Digital Twin and IIoT in Optimizing Manufacturing Process and Quality Management
traceability of products , discovers process exceptions and quality anomalies and enables quality issues resolution in time .
• On this basis , moreover , through statistical analysis of data , enables process verifications and improvements .
It ultimately helps production operators to achieve the goal of avoiding defective products , improving product quality , and reducing production costs .
Although the technical approach , technologies and solution are applicable in the wider use scenarios in the steelmaking processes , the project reported here initially focus one of the steelmaking processes , namely , the forging process to get started , verify and improve the solution before expanding into other processes 6 .
3.1 The Design Process - Lean Six Sigma Management Driven
After a development contract was completed with the customer during which a preliminary use scenario research was carried on site , a comprehensive on-site discovery-research was carried out by a team with expertise in various domains , which mainly include :
• Industrial domain experts with deep insights about steelmaking processes who help to understand the production operation processes and are capable of evaluating the business needs of the customers from which to derive business requirements .
• Industrial software application analysists who work with industrial domain experts to translate business requirements into software requirements and assist the design of the software solution .
• Industrial data analytic engineers who are experienced with data modeling techniques to understand the data analytic requirements and map them into input data and modeling requirements .
• Industrial control / automation engineers who are responsible for gathering information about the deployment structure and configuration of the industrial equipment and other systems involved in the project , evaluating the connectivity and data collection requirements and design the IoT portion of the software solution .
Among the multi-dimensional on-site research , the most critical work is the evaluation of customer requirements in establishing this new production process and product quality management application which is to become a major tool to be used by production operators and managers alike in their respective daily work . The Lean management and Six Sigma concepts and best practice , having long been proven to be effective in in production operation management , are used as guiding principles to evaluate the production process and product
6
As of the writing of this article , the first phase of the project has been completed and customer acceptance has obtained . A related project in a different steelmaking process has been launched .
- 66 - March 2021