The Digital Twin: Realizing the Cyber-Physical Production System for Industry 4.0

Abstract

Concerning current approaches to planning of manufacturing processes, the acquisition of a sufficient data basis of the relevant process information and subsequent development of feasible layout options requires 74% of the overall time-consumption. However, the application of fully automated techniques within planning processes is not yet common practice. Deficits are to be observed in the course of the use of a fully automated data acquisition of the underlying process data, a key element of Industry 4.0, as well as the evaluation and quantification and analysis of the gathered data. As the majority of the planning operations are conducted manually, the lack of any theoretical evaluation renders a benchmarking of the results difficult. Current planning processes analyze the manually achieved results with the aid of simulation. Evaluation and quantification of the planning procedure are limited by complexity that defies manual controllability. Research is therefore required with regard to automated data acquisition and selection, as the near real-time evaluation and analysis of a highly complex production systems relies on a real-time generated database. The paper presents practically feasible approaches to a multi-modal data acquisition approach, its requirements and limitations. The further concept of the Digital Twin for a production process enables a coupling of the production system with its digital equivalent as a base for an optimization with a minimized delay between the time of data acquisition and the creation of the Digital Twin. Therefore a digital data acquisition approach is necessary. As a consequence a cyber-physical production system can be generated, that opens up powerful applications. To ensure a maximum concordance of the cyber-physical process with its real-life model a multimodal data acquisition and evaluation has to be conducted. The paper therefore presents a concept for the composition of a database and proposes guidelines for the implementation of the Digital Twin in production systems in small and medium-sized enterprises.