Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of reconfiguring an automation system using Digital Twin

Abstract

Increasing product variety and shortening product lifecycles require a fast and inexpensive reconfiguration of existing manufacturing systems. A synchronized Digital Twin of the manufacturing system is one solution to face these challenges. In order to use the Digital Twin for reconfiguration, a major challenge is to keep the developed Digital Twin of a manufacturing system, which was created during the engineering process, synchronized with the real system after commissioning. To automatically synchronize the cross-domain models of a Digital Twin after the commissioning of a manufacturing system, the authors introduced the Anchor-Point-Method in their previous papers. In this paper, the realization of the Anchor-Point-Method based on an assistance system is presented and the functionality is evaluated. This assistance system enables having an up-to-date Digital Twin of a manufacturing system available during the entire life-cycle of a system. Finally, a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the advantages of a synchronized Digital Twin for the reconfiguration of a manufacturing system is presented. For this purpose, an automated system has been digitally and physically designed and built. On this system, a reconfiguration using the synchronized Digital Twin was performed and compared with another reconfiguration without Digital Twin collected through a survey. The results show that the Digital Twin can reduce the time of the reconfiguration process by up to 58 percent.