Defining a Digital Twin-based Cyber-Physical Production System for autonomous manufacturing in smart shop floors

Abstract

Smart manufacturing is the core idea of the fourth industrial evolution. For a smart manufacturing shop floor, real-time monitoring, simulation and prediction of manufacturing operations are vital to improve the production efficiency and flexibility. In this paper, the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) and Digital Twin technologies are introduced to build the interconnection and interoperability of a physical shop floor and corresponding cybershop floor. A Digital Twin-based Cyber-Physical Production System (DT-CPPS) is further established, and the configuring mechanism, operating mechanism and real-time data-driven operations control of DT-CPPS are discussed in detail. It is expected that DT-CPPS will provide the basis for shop floors to march towards smart manufacturing.

Keywords:

• Smart manufacturing
• Digital Twin
• Cyber-Physical Production System (CPPS)
• autonomous manufacturing
• operations control

ORCID

Felix T.S. Chan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7374-2396

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51705030, 71471158), the Hong Kong Scholars Program (No. XJ2018016) and the Youth Talent Support Program of Shaanxi (No. 20180410).