Heterogeneous Communication Middleware for Digital Twin Based Cyber Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Communication systems and network are a backbone for manufacturing systems and IoT in Industry 4.0. In this context, the control software systems are made of scalable services that exchange through communication middlewares. Among them, the definition of the Digital Twin exhibits even more needs for heterogeneous communication, due to the various nature of the devices and their providers but also to legacy applications. The maintenance of such systems becomes tricky when the communication statements are widespreadly merged in the application code. In this paper, we investigate the separation of the communication concerns from other aspects of the application in order to improve the system evolution and make it adaptable and reconfigurable to different contexts (resources, workshop...). Various approaches are compared and a solution is exhibited with a first prototype.

Digital Twins: Review and Challenges

“…Regarding the level of integration, Kritzinger in his work [50], get as most used level the Digital Shadow (35 percent), followed by Digital Model (28 percent) and with a lower percentage the Digital Twin (18 percent), having a 19 percent of publications of indeterminate level of integration. The publications that present data exchange do so through the main communication trends, addressed in a previous section, however, only the publications [71,15,86,92,20,5,66,52,44,4,51,35,75,23] present communication between DTs of the same system. The results of the categorization can be seen in Fig.…”

“…the DTs of the same system. Andre focuses his research work [5], on the communication layer by using DT in distributed systems, with the aim of improving the evolution of the system and making it more adaptable and configurable for different contexts, the authors create a multi-protocol communication tool (middleware), which allows the use of different communication protocols between the different elements of a holon-based manufacturing system. As a case study, the authors use the SOFAL production line, all communications between the HMI (Human Machine Interface) the SOHMS (service-oriented holonic manufacturing software) and the simulation tool (Arena Emulation) are implemented at a low level through TCP/IP connections using sockets, and the created middleware MPCT (Multi-Protocol Communication Tool) is used for communication among the real and digital twin, and also between DTs that are part of the system.…”

“…realizes forecasts to optimize the behavior of the system. Other examples of the manufacturing area can be seen in [45,82,79,4,40,13,59,101,7,86,62,5,71,20,15,51,35] Aeronautics and Space (AS), Tuegel [90] proposes the reengineering of one aircraft structural life prediction process, Rios [73] created a framework which facilitates the univocal connection between the flying twin (aircraft) identified by an ID, and its DT; and Majumdar [60] examines how the multi-physical environment (electric field) of the airplanes materials (fiber reinforced polymers) causes microstructural changes and can affect their structural performance. Informatics (I), in this field, the DTs are used to create control architectures based on this technology.…”

“…Although all articles use the term Digital Twin within their content, not all of them present the bi-directional exchange of data among the DT and the physical twin. The publications that present data exchange do so through the main communication trends, addressed in a previous section, however, only the publications[71,15,86,92,20,5,66,52,44,4,51,35,75,23] present communication between DTs of the same system. The results of the categorization can be seen in Fig.24.…”

Adoption of digital twin for sustainable manufacturing and achievements of production strategic-planned goals

“…This can be nicely aligned to the goals of objectives of the organization to adapt their products being delivered by changing the design or enhancing the quality, If the data is available from anywhere across the supply chain it will help organization to perform better and adapt to satisfy future demands. In brief, digital twin can enhance significantly the digital experiences of production and equipment as all the data is in the digital format so that the products and the assets will each have a unique digital story to help in giving authenticity, transparency, compliance and visibility [18] .…”