A framework for cyber-physical production system management and digital twin feedback monitoring for fast failure recovery

ABSTRACT

With the ongoing Industry 4.0 (I4.0) revolution, plant management and supervision play a key role in the development and (re-)design of industrial plants. In the arising scenarios, the need to coordinate human workers and autonomous systems, sharing the same environment, teaming together, becomes a fundamental requirement. Indeed, even though automation in standard assembly lines has reached high efficiency and reliability, for complex and new applications, a certain amount of failure must be considered for future addressing. This paper presents a framework for the flexible coordination of such a complex and heterogeneous cyber-physical system. A digital Ttwin mirrors in real-time the plant system, while a dashboard displays plant status, providing the human operators with fundamental tools for supervision and prompt intervention in case of failure. The framework was developed and tested in an industrially relevant environment, specifically for the assembly of the interior of an aircraft fuselage.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyber-physical production system
• digital twin
• industry 4.0
• human–robot collaboration
• human-in-the-loop production systems

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Fraunhofer IFAM for the real and virtual fuselage mock-up and its use and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Clean Sky 2 project EURECA [303024] and SIMFAL [737881].