Challenges in Digital Twin Development for Cyber-Physical Production Systems

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state and challenges of developing digital twins for cyber-physical production systems, emphasizing the need for robust tools with strong semantic foundations to improve modeling, simulation, and analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of existing digital twin tools and discusses key design challenges in manufacturing applications.

Findings

Digital twin technology is emerging as a key component in cyber-physical production systems.

Current tools lack strong semantic foundations for accurate modeling and simulation.

Design challenges include capturing physical dynamics and ensuring system interoperability.

Abstract

The recent advancement of information and communication technology makes digitalisation of an entire manufacturing shop-floor possible where physical processes are tightly intertwined with their cyber counterparts. This led to an emergence of a concept of digital twin, which is a realistic virtual copy of a physical object. Digital twin will be the key technology in Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) and its market is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. Nevertheless, digital twin is still relatively a new concept that people have different perspectives on its requirements, capabilities, and limitations. To better understand an effect of digital twin's operations, mitigate complexity of capturing dynamics of physical phenomena, and improve analysis and predictability, it is important to have a development tool with a strong semantic foundation that can accurately model, simulate, and synthesise the digital twin. This paper reviews current state-of-art on tools and developments of digital twin in manufacturing and discusses potential design challenges.