Digital twin-driven system for roller conveyor line: design and control

Abstract

Roller conveyor line (RCL) plays an important role in smart manufacturing workshop and modern logistics industry. RCL transfers the specified type of workpiece box to specified exports according to the personalized demands. It greatly improves the sorting speed and delivery speed of workpiece. However, the construction of RCL is very time-consuming and difficult because of the unintuitive design and complex control. In order to reduce the difficulty of constructing RCL and eliminate the gap between design and control, a research about cyber-physical system (CPS) for design and control driven by digital twin (DT) is conducted. In this research, three key enabling technologies of constructing five-dimensional DT for RCL are illustrated in detail as follows: (1) multi-scale modeling method of RCL; (2) extensible distributed communication framework; (3) fast mapping method of distributed controllers. Finally, this paper provides a case study of using the CPS driven by DT to design and control RCL. Experimental results show that the CPS in this paper can achieve the rapid design and distributed control of RCL.