Digital Twin Framework for Reconfiguration Management: Concept & Evaluation

To remain competitive in a highly dynamic environment, manufacturing companies have to quickly react to disturbances or changing customer requirements. To enable manufacturing systems to cover these dynamics, the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing systems was introduced. From a technical point of view, this concept has been exploited for the past 20 years, revealing several different design solutions. However, industrial application is still an exception. Our analysis led to the assumption that this is due to a lack of operator support for reconfiguration management. In addition, mostly individual aspects of reconfiguration are considered instead of exploiting the entire reconfiguration space at the system and machine level. Therefore, in this paper, we present a digital twin framework for reconfiguration management considering reconfiguration as a holistic problem. We evaluate the framework by conducting a case study and challenging it by evaluating the completeness based on a systematic literature review, and analyze if it follows good practice based on 32 requirements for digital twin frameworks.