Digital Twin + Industrial Internet for Smart Manufacturing: A Case Study in the Steel Industry
material, energy, information and value
flows across these sub-processes.
in isolated software applications each
requiring a separate and dedicated stack
that includes a server hardware, operating
system, databases and software
implementing the specific business logic.
Moreover, because many of these software
applications are highly customized, they
tend to be closed-systems that are not
intended to be interoperable with other
systems. This leads to the formation of
application islands and data silos, as
illustrated in Figure 2). This situation makes
the integration among the application
islands and data silos a daunting, if not
nearly impossible, task. However, this type
of integration is exactly what is required to
achieve a higher level of optimization across
various equipment in a sub-process and
across sub-processes.
Implementing data-driven optimization in
such a large-scale manufacturing
environment faces several major
challenges.
Building on the foundation of automation
systems over the past few decades, various
information systems (software applications)
have been implemented to manage one or
another aspect of the complex production
process (application domain). The software
has proven valuable in managing the
planning and execution of the
manufacturing processes, quality, energy
efficiency and equipment (asset)
maintenance. Often, the same type of
software applications (e.g. quality
management) are implemented for
different sub-processes. On the other hand,
most of these software applications have
been implemented based on the
conventional hierarchical architecture
patterns, such as ISA-95. This often results
For example, in order to provide a closed-
loop optimization over manufacturing
process engineering for the purpose of
finding the optimal set of process
engineering parameters, it needs to obtain
feedback from various operational domains.
Figure 2: Application islands and data silos in manufacturing application environments
- 14 -
November 2019