Digital Twin Integration using Lingua Franca and FMI for Testing Factory Automation Software

The continuous evolution of Industry 4.0 demands advanced solutions for optimizing production processes, reducing energy consumption, and enhancing the capabilities of both human operators and production devices in smart factories. As factory automation software becomes increasingly complex, ensuring its robustness through extensive testing is critical. However, testing on actual production systems is often impractical due to the critical nature of the software.This paper explores the use of digital twins to simulate factory environments, enabling thorough validation of automation software. We propose leveraging Lingua Franca and the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) standard to create comprehensive digital twins. Lingua Franca ensures deterministic execution in simulations, while FMI facilitates the integration of diverse simulators for accurate modeling of heterogeneous systems. We introduce an interfacing method to integrate FMI components within Lingua Franca and present a strategy for modeling software-machinery interactions using the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) protocol. The methodology is applied to develop a digital twin of a logistics subsystem in a manufacturing system, demonstrating the effectiveness of the simulation environment through various scenarios.