A Model-Driven Digital Twin for Manufacturing Process Adaptation

Digital twins are a means to better understand, engineer, and use cyber-physical systems. In manufacturing, digital twins can optimize production, prevent failures, and save resources. To consolidate the different approaches to digital twins in manufacturing, ISO 23247 defines the essential functional elements of a digital twin. We present a model-driven digital twin exemplar that realizes part of this standard to analyze milling processes. Our digital twin reference architecture includes a digital twin service component that manages and connects different services to adapt the manufacturing process according to a given objective. Two digital twin services, for the adaptation of component and tool conditions and for geometric error adaptation, illustrate the potential of this reference architecture. The digital twin connects to an industrial milling machine via domain-specific languages. This exemplar uses models at design time and at runtime to separate the concerns of software engineers and domain experts and leverages these models to understand and optimize the use of industrial machine tools.