Creation Of Digital Twins Research Articles

Digital Twins for predictive maintenance: A case study for a flexible IT-architecture

The Digital Twin offers great potential for use in predictive maintenance applications to prevent failures of critical components. However, due to the absence of standardized defined functionalities of Digital Twins and the associated software tools, the creation of Digital Twins is linked to a high expenditure of resources. This effort is due to static connections of components within the IT-architecture, which cannot be reused for other Digital Twins, as these IT-architectures are mainly single-case solutions. Although there are approaches for creating flexible IT-architectures, these have not yet been examined in depth for their reusability to build Digital Twins with different implementation conditions. Therefore, the goal of this case study is to investigate the reusability and the associated reduction of effort involved in building Digital Twins. For this purpose, the approaches of an IoT-platform and a service-oriented architecture are combined to create a reusable and flexible IT-architecture for Digital Twins. This IT-architecture is applied to a first use case of a Digital Twin for a compressor and then adapted to a second use case of a Digital Twin for a wind turbine. These use cases have different implementation conditions, but both find application in predictive maintenance. Finally, the reusability is evaluated and, in this context, the extent to which the resources required for building Digital Twins can be reduced when utilizing a flexible IT-architecture.

PolyVerif: An Open-Source Environment for Autonomous Vehicle Validation and Verification Research Acceleration

Validation and Verification (V&V) of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based cyber physical systems such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) is currently a vexing and unsolved problem. AVs integrate subsystems in areas such as detection, sensor fusion, localization, perception, and path planning. Each of these subsystems contains significant AI content integrated with traditional hardware and software components. The complexity for validating even a subsystem is daunting and the task of validating the whole system is nearly impossible. Fundamental research in advancing the state-of-the-art for AV V&V is required. However, for V&V researchers, it is exceedingly difficult to make progress because of the massive infrastructure requirements to demonstrate the viability of any solution. This paper presents PolyVerif, the world’s first open-source solution focused on V&V researchers with the objective of accelerating the state-of-the-art for AV V&V research. PolyVerif provides an AI design and verification framework consisting of a digital twin creation process, an open-source AV engine, access to several open-source physics based simulators, and open-source symbolic test generation engines. PolyVerif’s objective is to arm V&V researchers with a framework which extends the state-of-the-art on any one of the many major axes of interest and use the remainder of the infrastructure to quickly demonstrate the viability of their solution. Given its open-source nature, researchers can also contribute their innovations to the project. Using this critical property of open-source environments, the innovation rate of the whole research community to solve these vexing issues can be greatly accelerated. Finally, the paper also presents results from several projects which have used PolyVerif.

About Creating a Digital Twins in Field of Earth Sciences

A brief analysis of the research results on the creation of digital twins in the field of earth sciences presented. For the first time approaches proposed to create a digital twin for this field. The approximate composition of the digital twin data for the development of hydrometeorological support for consumers has been determined. Requirements for the digital twin developed. Digital twins should become key components at the heart of smart buildings, cities, digital enterprises, self-driving cars, flying objects, ships, and others that require data on the state of the environment and the state of these objects. The digital twin can be used to impact models of the environment on enterprises, to solve tasks of calculating the possible damage and cost of preventive actions in the event of the passage of disasters.

Importance of Prospective Registries and Clinical Research Networks in the Evolution of Spinal Cord Injury Care.

Only 100 years ago, traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) was commonly lethal. Today, most people who sustain SCI survive with continual efforts to improve their quality of life and neurological outcomes. SCI epidemiology is changing as preventative interventions reduce injuries in younger individuals, and there is an increased incidence of incomplete injuries in aging populations. Early treatment has become more intensive with decompressive surgery and proactive interventions to improve spinal cord perfusion. Accurate data, including specialized outcome measures, are crucial to understanding the impact of epidemiological and treatment trends. Dedicated SCI clinical research and data networks and registries have been established in the United States, Canada, Europe, and several other countries. We review four registry networks: the North American Clinical Trials Network (NACTN) SCI Registry, the National Spinal Cord Injury Model Systems (SCIMS) Database, the Rick Hansen SCI Registry (RHSCIR), and the European Multi-Center Study about Spinal Cord Injury (EMSCI). We compare the registries' focuses, data platforms, advanced analytics use, and impacts. We also describe how registries' data can be combined with electronic health records (EHRs) or shared using federated analysis to protect registrants' identities. These registries have identified changes in epidemiology, recovery patterns, complication incidence, and the impact of practice changes such as early decompression. They've also revealed latent disease-modifying factors, helped develop clinical trial stratification models, and served as matched control groups in clinical trials. Advancing SCI clinical science for personalized medicine requires advanced analytical techniques, including machine learning, counterfactual analysis, and the creation of digital twins. Registries and other data sources help drive innovation in SCI clinical science.

Toward 3D Property Valuation—A Review of Urban 3D Modelling Methods for Digital Twin Creation

Increasing urbanisation has inevitably led to the continuous construction of buildings. Urban expansion and densification processes reshape cities and, in particular, the third dimension (3D), thus calling for a technical shift from 2D to 3D for property valuation. However, most property valuation studies employ 2D geoinformation in hedonic price models, while the benefits of 3D modelling potentially brought for property valuation and the general context of digital twin (DT) creation are not sufficiently explored. Therefore, this review aims to identify appropriate urban 3D modelling method(s) for city DT, which can be used for 3D property valuation (3DPV) in the future (both short-term and long-term). We focused on 3D modelling studies investigating buildings and urban elements directly linked with residential properties. In total, 180 peer-reviewed journal papers were selected between 2016 and 2020 with a narrative review approach. Analytical criteria for 3D modelling methods were explicitly defined and covered four aspects: metadata, technical characteristics, users’ requirements, and ethical considerations. From this, we derived short-term and long-term prospects for 3DPV. The results provide references for integrating 3D modelling and DT in property valuation and call for interdisciplinary collaboration including researchers and stakeholders in the real estate sector, such as real estate companies, house buyers and local governments.

Cost-efficient digital twins for design space exploration: A modular platform approach

The industrial need to predict the behaviour of radically new products brings renewed interest in how to set up and make use of physical prototypes and testing. However, conducting physical testing of a large number of radical concepts is still a costly approach.This paper proposes an approach to actively use digital twins in the early phases where the design can be largely changed. The approach is based on creating a set of digital twin modules that can be reused and recomposed to create digital twin variants. However, this paper considers that developing a digital twin can be very costly. Therefore, the approach focuses on supporting the decisions about the optimal mix of modules, and about whether a new digital twin module should be developed.The approach is applied to an industrial case derived from the collaboration with two space manufacturers. The results highlight how the design of the modular platform has an impact on the cost of the digital twin, if commonality and reusability aspects are considered. These results point at the cost-efficiency of applying a modular approach to digital twin creation, as a means to reuse the results from physical testing to validate new designs and their ranges of validity

Development of a digital twin of the heating network in various software systems

The concept of implementation of smart thermal grids or 4th generation heat supply systems is a priority for the development of district heating systems in Russia and is to become the best available technology (BAT) for all new and reequipped energy systems. This will help to reduce inappropriate losses of thermal energy, reduce the accident rate of power systems, increase their energy efficiency and reliability, and simplify the integration of modern renewable energy sources (RES) into existing energy systems.One of the key technologies needed to create such systems is the creation of digital twins of heating networks and simulation models of district heating systems. The paper describes the development of a digital twin for the section under consideration of the heat network. The developed experimental stand — a real physical model — was used as a section of the heating network. It was subjected to tests in order to determine the capabilities of systems for remote monitoring of heat carrier parameters, as well as modeling emergency situations in sections of the heating network. The experimental setup was also used for verification of the digital twin being developed. To create a digital model of the experimental stand authors used Matlab Simulink, ZuluThermo and SimInTech. The ZuluThermo program enables to create a digital twin that simulates stationary modes of the thermal system, Matlab Simulink and SimInTech — both stationary and dynamic processes occurring on sections of heating networks. The dynamic model of the heat supply system was used to simulate the process of mutual influence of heat energy consumers. As scenarios of dynamic processes, situations in Matlab Simulink and SimInTech that arise during the operation of automation at thermal points of consumers were simulated. It was shown the mutual influence of heat consumers on each other when regulating the heat load, as well as their influence on consumers who are unable to independently regulate their heat load.

Educational Case Studies for Pilot Engineer 4.0 Programme: Monitoring and Control of Discrete-Event Systems Using OPC UA and Cloud Applications

The current trend in industry is the digitalisation of production processes using modern information and communication technologies, a trend that falls under the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. Applications that link the world of information technologies (IT) and operational technologies (OT) are in particular demand. On the basis of information from practice, it can be stated that there is a shortage of specialists in the labour market for the interconnection of PLCs with information and communication technologies (cloud, web, mobile applications, etc.) in Slovakia and neighbouring countries. However, this problem is beginning to affect other countries in Europe as well. The main objective of the work was to prepare case studies suitable for educational purposes, which would address the modelling and control of a virtual discrete-event system using a PLC program and its subsequent interfacing to a cloud application. Within the scope of the work, three case studies were prepared to demonstrate the control of discrete-event system using different programming systems and their communication with the developed cloud applications. These applications are to be used for data monitoring and emergency intervention of the discrete-event system. The characteristics of the prepared case studies, which combine operational and informational technologies, predestines them for use in the sphere of education of engineers for digitalisation of production processes. They can also be helpful in research on the creation of digital twins, which represent a type of symmetry between real and virtual systems.

Simulation modeling of a section segment in the processing of ferruginous quartzites

In order to improve mineral separation efficiency, new adaptive process monitoring, predicting, and management systems are required. These may be developed through the creation of digital twins of respective processes, stages, and plants. Simulation models are a special type of mathematical models that reproduce the behavior of actual systems in time over a wide range of parameter values. The authors have developed a simulation model of a section segment in the processing of ferruginous quartzites and implemented it in the form of a computer application. The results of pilot tests conducted at section No. 9 of the crushing and processing plant of JSC «Olcon» were used as the initial data for its development. The objective was to predict distribution characteristics for the design size class (–0.071 mm) by process stages when producing magnetite concentrate. The paper presents the identified dependencies between process indicators of distributed mass flows under cyclic loads, the results of statistical processing of the sampling data, and their comparison with the simulation results. The example of modeling the classification and screening processes is used to demonstrate the feasibility of rapidly predicting process efficiency using the Hancock–Luiken criterion. It has been shown that the model may be paired with the enterprise monitoring system, the probability of deviation from the specified conditions may be identified for each section, step-by-step predictions of process indicators and decision-making recommendations may be issued, and direct equipment operation via the automated control system may be performed. It is assumed that the model will be complemented with functions to record distribution of the product mineral composition for each processing operation.

Modern problems and directions of development of forest cartography

Like any other area of cartography, forest cartography is evolving and changing. However, it should be noted that in Russia the form of presentation, content and design of forest cartographic products are strictly regulated by various legal acts, which makes this direction of cartography more conservative. The purpose of the study is to identify the main problems and directions for the development of forest cartography. The article presents a study of the current state of forest cartography in Russia, considers modern foreign developments used in forest cartography, and identifies the main problems that arise when creating forest cartographic products. The study identified the most promising methods and technologies, the introduction of which will accelerate the development of domestic forest cartography, among them the development of GIS analysis methods, the introduction of mobile GIS, the creation of digital twins of the forest and the addition of forest cartographic products with geospatial knowledge.

Digital Twin for Human–Robot Collaboration in Manufacturing: Review and Outlook

Industry 4.0, as an enabler of smart factories, focuses on flexible automation and customization of products by utilizing technologies such as the Internet of Things and cyber–physical systems. These technologies can also support the creation of virtual replicas which exhibit real-time characteristics of a physical system. These virtual replicas are commonly referred to as digital twins. With the increased adoption of digitized products, processes and services across manufacturing sectors, digital twins will play an important role throughout the entire product lifecycle. At the same time, collaborative robots have begun to make their way onto the shop floor to aid operators in completing tasks through human–robot collaboration. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to provide insights into approaches used to create digital twins of human–robot collaboration and the challenges in developing these digital twins. A review of different approaches for the creation of digital twins is presented, and the function and importance of digital twins in human–robot collaboration scenarios are described. Finally, the paper discusses the challenges of creating a digital twin, in particular the complexities of modelling the digital twin of human–robot collaboration and the exactness of the digital twin with respect to the physical system.

Digital Twins of the Soil Microbiome for Climate Mitigation

Recent advances in computation power have enabled the creation of digital twins of the microbiome (DTM) to substantially curb soil greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions under global change conditions [...]

Heterogeneous Models Integration for Safety Critical Mechatronic Systems and Related Digital Twin Definition: Application to a Collaborative Workplace for Aircraft Assembly

Nowadays, several manufacturing systems are evolving towards a greater collaboration between human and robots. The development of such systems requires integrated design tasks involving many disciplines and domains such as systems engineering, safety analyses and multi-physics. Furthermore, the increasing presence of multiple and structured requirements makes the use of models inevitable during the designing phases and also strongly helpful during other phases of the system life-cycle. Besides, for a better efficiency, there is an increasing demand to have a Digital Twin of the system to be used for different purposes such as design improvements by playing different scenarios, virtual commissioning and controlling maintenance activities. In this paper, we first summarize the research context, the reference methodologies, and the emerging needs for Digital Twin creation. Then, we apply a design approach including Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), Model-Based Safety Assessment (MBSA) and multi-physics modeling for the design of a collaborative workplace for the assembly of Electro-Mechanical Actuators on an aircraft wing. An operational flow to integrate MBSE, MBSA and multi-physics modelling activities is provided. Then, after having identified some relevant scientific barriers, we provide a meta-model for system models integration within a digital twin framework.

Computational models in inflammatory bowel disease.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic and relapsing disease with multiple underlying influences and notable heterogeneity among its clinical and response‐to‐treatment phenotypes. There is no cure for IBD, and none of the currently available therapies have demonstrated clinical efficacies beyond 40%–60%. Data collected about its omics, pathogenesis, and treatment strategies have grown exponentially with time making IBD a prime candidate for artificial intelligence (AI) mediated discovery support. AI can be leveraged to further understand or identify IBD features to improve clinical outcomes. Various treatment candidates are currently under evaluation in clinical trials, offering further approaches and opportunities for increasing the efficacies of treatments. However, currently, therapeutic plans are largely determined using clinical features due to the lack of specific biomarkers, and it has become necessary to step into precision medicine to predict therapeutic responses to guarantee optimal treatment efficacy. This is accompanied by the application of AI and the development of multiscale hybrid models combining mechanistic approaches and machine learning. These models ultimately lead to the creation of digital twins of given patients delivering on the promise of precision dosing and tailored treatment. Interleukin‐6 (IL‐6) is a prominent cytokine in cell‐to‐cell communication in the inflammatory responses’ regulation. Dysregulated IL‐6‐induced signaling leads to severe immunological or proliferative pathologies, such as IBD and colon cancer. This mini‐review explores multiscale models with the aim of predicting the response to therapy in IBD. Modeling IL‐6 biology and generating digital twins enhance the credibility of their prediction.

A general take on a Tecnomatix Process Simulate´s Digital Twin creation and its exchange of information with the TIA Portal and PLC SIM Advanced

Digital twins are rapidly establishing themselves as a necessary step in digital change also in the design of automated and robotic manufacturing systems. The digital twin serves as an interface between physical industrial products and digital worlds. This allows you to map the continuous availability of data throughout the lifecycle from product planning and development, production and commissioning to use and recycling. An important step towards this goal is to create digital twins of the components in order to create a database usable for the design of new production systems in a virtual environment. One of the possibilities of using the digital twins is testing and virtual commissioning of production systems. Instead of the classic CAD model, the digital twin replaces a detailed digital image of individual components, including their full functionality. The Digital Twin comprises the CAD model, kinematic behavior model a most important is the logical behavior model. Our goal is to create a digital twin component of the production system, integrate a CAD model, create a kinematic model and a logical behavior model. This digital twin will have signals assigned to it for logical behavior. The result is the verification and testing of the information exchange between the virtual control system and the virtual model, using the Software-in-the-Loop method and the Tecnomatix Process Simulate software environment on the digital twin side and the Siemens TIA Portal with PLC SIM Advanced on the controller side. The result of the knowledge is that the exchange of information is functional and usable for virtual commissioning.

A methodology for the detection of functional relations of mechatronic components and assemblies in brownfield systems

The huge potential of the Digital Twin and its benefits in use cases such as virtual commissioning or reconfiguration planning for production systems is often described and well known. One reason that the usage of Digital Twins is becoming increasingly important are current trends, such as individualized mass production, which lead to more frequent reconfigurations of production systems or require higher flexibility. At the same time, many production systems have been in productive use for some time, so-called brownfield systems. Most of them do not have a Digital Twin, but would benefit from one, if available. However, the creation of a Digital Twin is a significant additional effort, due to the creation of the underlying models and the relations between them. Some promising approaches for the creation of domain-specific models already exist, which can be used for the creation of the unconnected parts of a Digital Twin. However, there are still few results for the creation of inter-domain relations, which cause problems in the creation of Digital Twins. This paper therefore presents a methodology for the automated reconstruction of functional relations as well as the separation of functionally related component groups of the plant and its software. For this purpose, the methodology imports the native PLC code via XML, extracts the relevant information from the code and enriches the resulting information model with explicit information about implicit relations in the code. Based on this, various elements of the PLC code are analyzed and the relationship of individual mechatronic components, that are available as signals, are examined and quantified. Thus, a part of the required relations for a Digital Twin is recognized automatically. The methodology and its benefits for the Digital Twin creation is presented and explained using a modular production system with several manufacturing stations as a proof-of-concept.

МНОГОАГЕНТНАЯ АУТЕНТИФИКАЦИЯ ЦИФРОВЫХ ДВОЙНИКОВ В КИБЕРФИЗИЧЕСКИХ СИСТЕМАХ

Formulation of the problem: the main catalysts for the development of cyber-physical systems are currently the growth of artificial intelligence and the creation of digital twins that have a complex vertical structure and exchange data for joint learning. At the same time, the empowerment of digital twins as data owners can lead to critical consequences in the field of ensuring the security of data systems. The development of evolutionary methods for ensuring information security, and in particular, methods for authenticating digital twins, is a fundamental issue on the way to the development of cyber-physical systems. Objective: analysis of aspects and principles of building a system and the process of authenticating digital twins in dynamic and scalable cyber-physical systems, organizing the process under study, indicators of its effectiveness and criteria for their evaluation. Methods used: system analysis, tuple algebra, methods for designing and evaluating the efficiency of complex systems. Novelty: the use of a multi-agent structure of the digital twin authentication system, which makes it possible to achieve guaranteed awareness of the security status of the system as a whole and respond appropriately in case of compromising events. The implementation of intelligent authentication management is proposed to be carried out using the application capabilities of tuple algebra, which takes into account differences in the structures of traditional and intelligent systems, as well as the difficulties of parallelization in distributed systems. To increase the stability of the multi-agent authentication system, the possibility of using cryptocode protocols is considered, which makes it possible to ensure the restoration of reliable authentication data in case of failures. Result: substantiation of new principles and technological solutions in the field of high-level design of cyber- physical systems.

ВИРТУАЛЬНЫЙ ЦИФРОВОЙ ТРЕХМЕРНЫЙ СЕНСОР. ОЦЕНКА ТОЧНОСТИ ИЗМЕРЕНИЯ ПАРАМЕТРОВ КИНЕМАТИЧЕСКОГО ПОРТРЕТА ЧЕЛОВЕКА

The article is devoted to the issue of a formalized description of the components of the uncertainty of the virtual digital scale of the control system built on the basis of video recorders in order to present it as a means of measurement. The analysis of the structure of the system is carried out in order to determine the hardware and methodological components, uncertainty. The modes of calibration, certification, control, the issues of creating digital twins based on the kinematic portrait of a person for use in rehabilitation systems in medicine and sports are considered. The creation of digital twins of objects, systems, processes is widely used to improve the accuracy of monitoring their condition, forecasting, improving the quality and reliability of management decisions. At the same time, an important aspect is to reduce the uncertainty of the boundaries of patterns, which increases the reliability of the system application and the development of a control action or a prediction result. Uncertainty reduction is provided by means of measurement, with the help of which control procedures are carried out.

Digital technologies revives planning

This article describes tasks and problems of state planning in the context of the development of digital technologies. Special attention is paid to the creation of digital twins. The article also deals with possible tools and methods of modern planning at different management levels and its ways to work with big data.

КОНЦЕПЦІЯ СТВОРЕННЯ МОДЕЛІ ЦИФРОВОГО ДВІЙНИКА ІНТЕЛЕКТУАЛЬНОГО ШПИНДЕЛЬНОГО ВУЗЛА

The digital twin technology isthe basis for the implementation of a cyber-physical technological system and is the core technol-ogy of Industry 4.0. A digital twin of a spindle unit is a dynamic virtual model that connects the spindle unit as a real physical object with its digital model in real time via two-way information links and reflects all the features of its design and functioning during its life cycle in real time. The key component of the digital twin of the spindle unit is its model, which is a set of digital models that describe its design, technological, operational, parameters and physical and mechanical processes that occur during the operation of the spin-dle unit and reflect the impact of these parameters on the quality and efficiency of its functioning during the life cycle in real time. Therefore, the paper considers the concept of creating a model of a digital twin of a spindle unit.The introductory part of the article formulates the issues and relevance and analyzes the works that propose approaches to the creation ofdigital twins, in particular, their models. In the main part of the paper, we first propose definitions of the terms digital twin of a spindle unit and its model. The conceptual structure of the digital twin of the spindle unit is presented. A list of characteristics of the model of the digital twin of the spindle unit is defined. The structure of the model of the digital twin of the intelligent spindle unit is determined and the stages of its model creation are given, the tasks to be solved at these stages are specified.It is shown that building a model of a digital twin of a spindle unit has a two-directional character and cannot be con-sidered a fully completed process, since the model of a digital twin of a spindle unit will be constantly refined and updated until the spindle unit is out of service. It is noted that when creating a model of a digital twin of a spindle unit, it is necessary to consider in detail the following key issues: high-precision modeling, model integration, model verification, model con-sistency, mechanisms of functioning and evolution of models.In the conclusions, attention is paid to the unresolved problematic issues that currently exist in the implementation of the model of a digital twin of a spindle unit. The generalized concept of creating a model of a digital twin of an intelligent spindle unit presented in this paper will allow further specifying the content of the stages of creating a digital twin of a spindle unit and forming a methodology for its creation.