A digital twin-driven approach towards smart manufacturing: reduced energy consumption for a robotic cell

ABSTRACT

One of the significant trends in smart manufacturing is the idea of industrial digitalization, which is enabled through the use of new information technologies, such as the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. However, manufacturing industries can only be achieved by combining the physical manufacturing world and digital world, to realize a series of smart manufacturing activities, such as active perception, real-time interaction, automatic processing, intelligent control, and real-time optimization, etc. In this paper, a digital twin-driven approach combines with agent-based decision-making for real-time optimization of motion planning in robotic cellular is proposed, with optimizing the physical and virtual layer at the manufacturing facility. Accordingly, an architecture of the digital twin-driven facility is design, and its operational mechanisms and implementation methods are explained in detail. Moreover, qualitative analysis and a quantitative comparison based on a real robotic cell are provided. Several key findings and observations are generated relating to managerial implications, which are valuable for various users to make manufacturing decisions under the digital twin-driven environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital twin
• smart manufacturing
• robotic cell
• energy consumption

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the [Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province] under Grant [2018A0303130035]; and [China Postdoctoral Science Foundation] under [2018M633008].