Digital Twin + Industrial Internet for Smart Manufacturing: A Case Study in the Steel Industry
Figure 6: Industrial Internet platform with Digital Twin Framework as data-driven operating platform
the interface concept in object-oriented
programming, thus simplifying application
developments by isolating the application
developers from the complexity of the
physical world.
horizontally layered architecture consists of
the loosely coupled data, model and
application frameworks unified by a digital
twin framework. Because of its cloud
computing origin, this architecture is
inherently scalable and reliable and enables
easy data integration, model execution and
application DevOp. It is flexible to be
deployed in various environments, e.g.
public clouds, private clouds or even on the
edge (as in the manufacturing environment),
providing the necessary performance,
security and control. At the end, such an
architecture
would
incorporate
an
increasing array of GUI-based tools, making
the development of data-driven industrial
applications simpler, at shorter cycles and
lowered cost, thus making the industrial
internet more economically applicable to a
larger number of manufacturing settings.
Envisioned here is a new class of data-driven
industrial operating platforms as illustrated
in Figure 6, encompassing the requisite
architectural elements discussed above in
reference to and consistent with the
functional domain architecture of the
Industrial Internet Reference Architecture 4
published by the Industrial Internet
Consortium. It is built on recent advances in
cloud computing, big data and machine
learning/Artificial Intelligence technologies
and provides a clear and simple horizontally
layered architecture that abstracts out the
common core capabilities required by data-
driven intelligent industrial applications. This
4
"Industrial Internet Reference Architecture," Industrial Internet Consortium, Boston, 2017.
IIC Journal of Innovation
- 19 -