Modern systems are becoming more demanding than ever before: machines and production plants should not only be best utilized, but also communicate automatically with each other and even manage unpredictable situations well. Starting with a submitted order, to the warehouse, to the production line - the entire company should grow together and become a large, intelligent, forward-thinking and independently acting system. During his inaugural lecture, Prof. Wimmer spoke about the way digital twins are considered a central technology to deal with these requirements. Prof. Wimmer remarked: "Digital twins are digital images of real-world objects. They describe both physical objects such as production facilities and non-physical things such as organizations." They can be used for various purposes. In the context of production facilities, for example, they can be used in planning to evaluate design alternatives of production facilities. They can also be used in the system operations to monitor the current state of the system and forecast future states of the system.

Manuel Wimmer studied business informatics at the Vienna University of Technology, earning a doctorate degree in 2008, and a post-doctorate in computer science at the same university in 2014. He was a visiting professor in Germany at the University of Marburg and at the Technical University of Munich before becoming an assistant professor at the Vienna University of Technology, conducting research and teaching in the field of software and system development. On March 1, 2019, he accepted a professorship for Software Engineering at the JKU Linz. His main area of research includes the theory and application of model-driven software and system development, for example in web-based systems, cloud computing, and building and production system automation. The Christian Doppler Laboratory for model-integrated intelligent production is also located here. Prof. Wimmer’s most recent research focuses on developing modeling languages, learning and search algorithms. "These three research projects flow into a Digital Twin Engineering platform designed to facilitate and accelerate creating and using digital twins," says Wimmer.