Energy digital Twins in smart manufacturing Systems: A literature review

Abstract

Rising costs and environmental impacts of energy consumption has risen in importance for consumers globally. Notably, high energy consumers like the manufacturing sectors are impacted more than ever, resulting in the urgent quest to cut their energy costs. A recent advancement in industry 4.0 technologies, the Digital Twin, offers a smart technology and tool that researchers are investigating to help reduce energy costs at the shopfloor level by analyzing and optimizing energy consumption. A literature review was conducted to investigate the current state of the art in the realm of Digital Twins in manufacturing with an energy focus. This is a relatively new research field only gaining popularity in applications and academia within the last five years. However, there is already promising research being conducted in this area. The results show that most Digital Twin publications technically fall under the term Digital Shadow or are not ‘true’ Digital Twins – mainly due to the lack of bi-directional data flow back to the physical asset from the virtual asset. There was only one publication that accurately fit the applied definition of Digital Twin to-date. Additionally, publications, if they provide the information at all, are using a variety of different types of energy meters to collect data or transferring that data from the physical to virtual asset with a universal communication protocol. It was also found that most papers are covering Energy Consumption Analysis over Monitoring and Optimization in their Digital Twin. This paper summarizes the analysis conducted from an in-depth review of a pool of criteria-met papers, while drawing conclusions and suggesting future research directions for researchers who want to investigate energy Digital Twins in the manufacturing domain.