The Digital Twin as a Core Component for Industry 4.0 Smart Production Planning

Abstract Production systems that adhere the Industry 4.0 vision require new ways of control and integration of individual components, such as robots, transportation system shuttles or mobile platforms. This paper proposes a new production system control concept based on closing a feedback loop between a production planning system and a digital twin of the physical production system. The digital twin keeps up-to-date information about the current state of the physical production system and it is combined with the production planner utilizing artificial intelligence methods. Production recipes and concrete process instantiations are planned for each production order on-the-fly, based on the production system state retrieved form the digital twin. This approach provides a high flexibility in terms of ability to add and to remove products as well as production resources. It also enables error recovery by re-planning the production if some failure happens. The proposed approach is tested and evaluated on an internally hosted Industry 4.0 testbed, which confirms its efficiency and flexibility