Designing a digital twin for micromanufacturing processes

Micromanufacturing raises some interesting, yet demanding and complex issues regarding modeling and data handling. Since utilizing both of these methods seems to be the key for process optimization, and preferably in real time, their coexistence is not a straightforward task, mainly due to interoperability and computational times. This work is a first step towards creating a roadmap for the design and the implementation of digital twins, provided that the digital twin offers both process optimization and tacit knowledge aggregation towards digital twin reusability. This involves the cooperation of different mathematical tools, an automated information manipulator and a human operator. Towards presenting such a roadmap and illustrating the choice of a workflow, a classification of the potentially useful tools is also presented herein. After that, a method to connect the tools through a software platform is discussed in order for a digital twin to be implemented. Finally, numerical examples are given to prove the fact that information reduction is needed in order for the proposed data manipulation effort (in terms of both processing and storing) to be minimized.