Digital Twin + Industrial Internet for Smart Manufacturing: A Case Study in the Steel Industry
As a pragmatic definition, a digital twin is a
full lifecycle dynamic digital replica of a
physical or logical object in the real world.
Examples of physical objects include valves,
motors, machine tools, production lines,
workshops, factories, etc.; and examples of
logical objects include production processes,
logistics processes and organizations. 3
oriented
(statistical,
machine
learning/artificial
intelligence)
and
geometrical or visualization-oriented (3D
modelling and augmented reality).
Lastly, a digital twin provides service
interfaces for software applications to
access its data and invoke its models.
Such a digital twin construct organizes and
enables access to data in association with its
corresponding real-world objects from an OT
perspective, rather than the usual data
tables in databases from an IT perspective,
making it more logical and thus easier for
running analytics models and developing
applications.
First, a digital twin contains data collected
from and about its physical counterpart,
spanning its full lifecycle. The data includes
the as-designed data (product design
specifications, process and engineering
data), as-manufactured data (production
equipment, material, method, quality data
and operators), and as-maintained data
(real-time and historical configuration and
operation state data, and maintenance
records) of the real-world counterpart. The
data many also include transactional records
about a piece of equipment, for example.
The connection between a digital twin and
its real-world counterpart is dynamic,
possibly real-time and bi-directional (see
Figure 4). Sensor data and operational states
of the real-world object are continuously
sent to the digital twin, and any instructions
or commands resulting from decisions from
the analytics in the specific operational and
Secondly, a digital twin contains a variety of
computational or analytic models pertaining
to its real-world counterpart, ranging from
first-principle-oriented (natural laws), data-
Figure 4: Digital Twin
3
For a general and broad definition of digital twin, “Industrial Internet Vocabulary, V2.0" Industrial Internet Consortium, Boston,
2019.
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November 2019