A Digital Twin Modular Framework for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

The emergence of Industry 4.0 and its related technologies transformed modern manufacturing environment by making them more intelligent. This is associated with the fast evolution of data acquisition technologies and the enormous amount of generated data. Among these modern manufacturing environment, Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) is a concept able to cope with the current market conditions, characterized by an increasingly personalized and volatile demand. At the same time, Digital Twin (DT) emerged as a new concept. DT represents a new data-driven vision that combines real time data analytics, optimization and simulation. When managing modern and complex manufacturing systems, DT provides new insights and potentials in decision-making process support. In this context, this paper is an attempt to present an integrated RMS digital twin (RMS-DT) modular framework. RMS-DT is a model that can represent the system state at any moment in time while allowing a holistic system visibility to improve its performances and enable flexible decision-making. The paper is concluded with a discussion, future challenges and perspectives in order to enhance the proposed RMS digital twin framework.