Design and Implementation of Hierarchical Digital Twins in Industrial Production Environments

Abstract

The increasing requirements for industrial production environments due to customer expectations, the implementation of batch size 1, and further automation of production processes are confronting companies with new challenges. In particular, the emergence of cyber-physical systems is influencing and complicating manufacturing processes by capturing an increasing amount of information within production facilities. Digital twins are an interdisciplinary technology that may solve these issues because they serve to monitor, control, and optimize cyber-physical systems by creating a digital representation of real-world objects. Existing concepts for digital twins usually only consider individual machines without their context. This is of limited use for production environments due to a multitude of different machines and associated sensor types. Therefore, we propose a requirements catalog, concept, and prototypical implementation for the hierarchical structuring of digital twins in this paper.