Digital Twin and IIoT in Optimizing Manufacturing Process and Quality Management
Fig . 3-8 : A screenshot of the Overall Process Status View . Fig . 3-8 shows an example of an application user interface for overall process status view .
The application is designed with a role-based user interaction model to improve user experience and enhance application security . Users of the application is divided into different roles based on their job functions and area of operations ( in different processes ). Each user can assume one or more roles based on the production organization details . When a user logs in , the application presents pages corresponding to the specific roles the user assumes . The application relies on the platform user authentication and fine-grain role-based authorization framework without the need to develop customer codes for the set of functions .
By leveraging the platform capability , a large portion of development work , including IoT connectivity and data collection , and digital twin design , are completed using GUI-based design and configuration toolset without the need of any coding . As result , development workload is great reduced and development cycle are substantially shortened .
For the business functions in the upper layer , though requiring code development , its scope is greatly reduced to just focus on business functions with user interaction through the UIs . In dealing with equipment and products ( physical entities ), the application interacts with the corresponding digital twins through their APIs , avoiding the need to deal with complex custom databases or directly with the equipment or product , it greatly simplifies the development of the application .
Since the application interaction with the physical entities is abstracted out by the digital twin layer , the application to a large degree is isolated from the physical environment in such a way that if the equipment changes , it is only needed to modify the underlying digital twin configuration without the need to change the application codes . This makes the application much more portable from one physical environment to another , for example , to the same process in another steel plant .
- 76 - March 2021