Digital Twin Preparation for the Prototyping Phase, a Use Case

Digital TwinDigital Twin (DT) is a growing topic within the manufacturingManufacturing industry. Moreover, early adoption of a Digital TwinDigital Twin is believed to benefit the rest of the product’s life cycle, like productionProduction, maintenance, and recycling. As the physical counterpart of the product is built only in the prototyping phase, this step is thought to be the first phase of a Digital TwinDigital Twin. Still, it necessitates preparation to reduce time-to-market and hence the developmentDevelopment costs. This paper shows the result of a Digital TwinDigital Twin preparation before the implementationImplementation on the prototype. This consists of creating a Digital TwinDigital Twin from the prototype of a complex logistic plant with a Discrete Event SimulationDiscrete event simulation (DES) tool, and a dummy Open PlatformPlatform Communications Unified Architecture (OPCUA) server communicating with each other. The methodology used is described with the use case of a logistic system simulated with an OPCUA Server on a Raspberry Pi. Although this work is specific to a particular use case, other researches may profit from the methodology applied and the experiences gathered for implementing a Digital TwinDigital Twin in the early phases of product developmentProduct Development.