Lab-Scale Gantry Crane Digital Twin Exemplar

TL;DR

This paper presents a lab-scale gantry crane and its digital twin, providing an open, reproducible example for research and education in digital twin technology, including physical and digital components and their integration.

Contribution

It introduces a publicly available, fully functional digital twin exemplar for a gantry crane, facilitating future research, validation, and educational efforts in digital twin development.

Findings

The digital twin includes CAD and kinematic models.

Services for control, data logging, visualization, and validation are provided.

The setup is open-source and relies on free software.

Abstract

The research topic of digital twins has attracted a large amount of interest over the past decade. However, publicly available exemplars remain scarce. In the interest of open and reproducible science, in this exemplar paper we present a lab-scale gantry crane and its digital twin. The exemplar comprises both the physical and digital side of the twin system. The physical side consists of the physical crane and its controller. The digital side covers the CAD models and kinematic model of the crane, and provides services for optimal control, historical data logging, data visualization and continuous validation. We used this setup as use case in several previous publications where its functionality was validated. It is publicly available and only relies on other freely available and commonly used software, this way we hope it can be used for future research or education on the topic of digital twins.