Abstract
Abstract The role of a Digital Twin is increasingly discussed within the context of Cyber-Physical Production Systems. Accordingly, various architectures for the realization of Digital Twin use cases are conceptualized. There lacks, however, a clear, encompassing architecture covering necessary components of a Digital Twin to realize various use cases in an intelligent automation system. In this contribution, the added value of a Digital Twin in an intelligent automation system is highlighted and various existing definitions and architectures of the Digital Twin are discussed. Flowingly, an architecture for a Digital Twin and an architecture for an Intelligent Digital Twin and their required components are proposed, with which use cases such as plug and produce, self-x and predictive maintenance are enabled. In the opinion of the authors, a Digital Twin requires three main characteristics: synchronization with the real asset, active data acquisition from the real environment and the ability of simulation. In addition to all the characteristics of a Digital Twin, an Intelligent Digital Twin must also include the characteristics of Artificial Intelligence. The Intelligent Digital Twin can be used for the realization of the autonomous Cyber-Physical Production Systems. In order to realize the proposed architecture for a Digital Twin, several methods, namely the Anchor-Point-Method, a method for heterogeneous data acquisition and data integration as well as an agent-based method for the development of a co-simulation between Digital Twins were implemented and evaluated.
Highlights
Current industries are increasingly faced with the challenge of delivering more customized products in shorter production times
The aspect of internal structure and content deals with the following aspects: – A meta-model for the Digital Twin with its internal models and their relations. – Possibilities to connect to legacy tools. – Possibilities to modularize the content of the Digital
The aspect of integration requires: – An identification mechanism for unambiguous identification of the real asset. – Mechanisms for identifying new real assets in a system, linking them to their Digital Twin, and synchronizing the Digital Twin with the real asset. – A mechanism for combining several Digital Twins into a Digital Twin of a system. It is demanded under the aspect of the runtime environment that possibilities are created for storing and distributing the content of the Digital Twin, for exchanging and synchronizing the content across company boundaries, for secure access to the content and for communicating information from the Digital Twin to the real asset
Summary
Behrang Ashtari Talkhestani*, Tobias Jung, Benjamin Lindemann, Nada Sahlab, Nasser Jazdi, Wolfgang Schloegl and Michael Weyrich.
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