Digital Twin + Industrial Internet for Smart Manufacturing: A Case Study in the Steel Industry
systems and optimization by information,
the industrial internet enables Smart
Manufacturing to optimize production
operations across various manufacturing
processes.
Leveraging
these
new
digitalization
capabilities,
industrial
enterprises can achieve high flexibility,
agility and efficiency; improve total
performance in their production and
business operations; create new service
capabilities and business models and finally
seek transformational outcomes. 2
T HE I NDUSTRIAL I NTERNET
The industrial internet and Smart
Manufacturing can be viewed as a twin-
movement in the larger context of industrial
digital transformation. They focus on
applying advances in communication and
computation technologies in industrial
processes to enable new capabilities and
optimize
operations.
These
new
technological advances include cloud
computing,
big
data,
machine
learning/artificial intelligence and new
communication technologies, which have
been developed in the recent decades and
used widely in the consumer and
commercial internet. Enabled by these new
technologies, the industrial internet seeks to
optimize industrial and manufacturing
operations by applying insights from
analytics on the vast amount of data
collected from the newly connected
equipment and systems. On the other hand,
Smart Manufacturing seeks to fully integrate
manufacturing systems and processes so
that they can be optimized by use of
information—or
information
driven
1
optimization of manufacturing. Laying its
foundation in connectivity and data
analytics, which are needed for integrating
D ATA , A NALYTICS AND A PPLICATION :
C LOSED L OOP O PTIMIZATION FOR THE
I NDUSTRIAL I NTERNET
To optimize industrial operations is to make
optimal decisions in response to changes,
with and without a human in the loop, in
operational or manufacturing processes. To
achieve this, we need access to the right
information at the right time about the
market, about the customers and the
workforce, about the processes and finally
about the physical assets and their operating
environment. Gaining insights about the
industrial assets and their operations is
where the industrial internet keenly focuses
on.
1
For a general perspectives of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing, including architecture for integrating manufacturing
systems and processes, "Reference Architecture Model," ZVEI – German Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers’ Association,
Frankfurt, 2015.
2
For an overview of the impact of the Industrial Internet of Things, World Economic Forum, "Industrial Internet of Things:
Unleashing the Potential of Connected Products and Devices," World Economic Forum, January 2015.
IIC Journal of Innovation
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