Integration of automatic generated simulation models, machine control projects and management tools to support whole life cycle of industrial digital twins.

Abstract

The paper presents a framework of automatic generation of industrial digital twins. These digital twins will be suitable to support preliminary design phases of systems development, but also to support next phases of detailed designs implementation and systems running phases. These digital twin allow, from the preliminary designing phase, to generate a complete simulation of the target industrial system. But, at the same time, and without the need to develop and add any subsequent code, they should be a valuable support for the phases and tasks of exploitation: maintenance, machine or system learning, etc. The problem is that the requirements for first development phases are much more generic than those for later phases. For this reason, instead of incorporating specificities in the simulation system, the framework takes advantage of the applications which are being developed for the implementation of the real system. In these applications (the control program and the decisions and the high level management system), the specificities have had to be taken into account. The system has been specialized in industrial transportation and warehouse systems which, although have a finite number or building objects, they have an infinite set of final configurations, very different one from each other. The paper presents an evaluation of current simulation platforms suitable to be used as part of the framework, and the digital twin industrial system generation framework itself. An example of application is as well presented.