A Six-Layer Digital Twin Architecture for a Manufacturing Cell : Proceedings of SOHOMA 2018

Abstract

Industrie 4.0, cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) and the In- ternet of Things (IoT) are current focusses in automation and data exchange in manufacturing, arising from the rapid increase in capabilities in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the ubiquitous internet. A key enabler for the advances promised by CPPSs is the concept of a "digital twin", which is the cyber representation of the physical twin, which in this paper is a manufac- turing cell. This paper presents an architecture for such a digital twin, that ena- bles exchanging data and information between a remote emulation or simula- tion and the physical twin. The architecture comprises different layers, includ- ing a local data layer, an IoT Gateway layer, cloud-based databases and a layer containing emulations and simulations.