A Digital Twin Driven Human-Centric Ecosystem for Industry 5.0

Abstract

Industry 5.0 embodies the vision for the future of factories, emphasizing the importance of sustainable industrialization and the role of industry in society, through the key concept of placing the well-being of workers at the center of the production process. Building upon this vision, we propose a new paradigm to design human-centric industrial applications. To this end, we exploit Digital Twin (DT) technology to build a digital replica for each entity on the shop floor and support and augment interaction among workers and machines. While so far DTs in automation have been proposed for machine digitalization, the core element of the proposed approach is the Operator Digital Twin (ODT). In this scenario, biometrics allows to build a reliable model of those operator’s characteristics that are relevant in working contexts. Biometric traits are measured and processed to detect physical, emotional, and mental conditions, which are used to define the operator’s state. Perspectively, this allows to manage and monitor production and processes in an operator-in-the-loop manner, where not only is the operator aware of the state of the plant, but also any technological agent in the plant acts and reacts according to the operator’s needs and conditions. In this paper, we define the modeling of the envisioned ecosystem, present the designed DT’s blue-print architecture, discuss its implementation in relevant application scenarios, and report an example of implementation in a collaborative robotics scenario.