An Interoperable Digital Twin with the IEEE 1451 Standards

Abstract

The shop floor or factory floor is the area inside a factory where manufacturing production is executed. The digitalisation of this area has been increasing in the last few years, introducing the Digital Twin (DT) and the Industry 4.0 concepts. A DT is the digital representation of a real object or an entire system. A DT includes a high diversity of components from different vendors that need to interact with each other efficiently. In most cases, the development of standards and protocols does not consider the need to operate with other standards and protocols, causing interoperability issues. Transducers (sensors and actuators) use the communication layer to exchange information with digital contra parts, and for this reason, the communication layer is one of the most relevant aspects of development. This paper covers DT development, going from the physical to the visualisation layer. The reference architecture models, standards, and protocols focus on interoperability to reach a syntactic level of communication between the IEEE 1451 and the IEC 61499 standards. A semantic communication layer connects transducer devices to the digital representation, achieving a semantic level of interoperability. This communication layer adds semantics to the communication process, allowing the development of an interoperable DT based on the IEEE 1451 standards. The DT presented reaches the syntactic and semantic levels of interoperability, allowing the monitoring and visualisation of a prototype system.