Control and Communication Coordination for Industrial Digital Twins of Sintering Process

Abstract

AbstractThe smart factory is driving the deep integration of a new generation of information technology and manufacturing. Industrial digital twins, which monitor and manage all factors in the industrial process based on virtual representations, greatly improve the production quality control of manufacturing. Its popularization demands strong supports of the industrial field network and coordination of control and communication. This chapter proposes a new scheme of control and communication coordination for industrial digital twins, which takes the advantages of the following key technologies: (1) a new multi-tier coordination architecture toward the field of smart factory, which meets diverse requirements of the manufacturing process in industrial fields and facilitates the integration of communication technology (CT), operation technology (OT), and information technology (IT); (2) a time-sensitive networking (TSN) based deterministic and real-time communication for vast amount of data interaction in control and communication coordination for digital twins; (3) an intelligent modeling way for industrial process by integrating the numerical and data-driven methods; and (4) a digital twin-assisted intelligent decision-making mechanism. The scheme is verified by the case study on sintering process, where we construct more than 100 digital twins and achieve the production quality prediction accuracy of over 90% with 2-hour in advance.KeywordsControl and communication coordinationTime-sensitive networkDeterministic communicationNetwork configurationIndustrial digital twinsSintering processQuality prediction