A Reconfigurable Modeling Approach for Digital Twin-based Manufacturing System

The emergence of digital twin enables real-time interaction and integration between the physical world and the information world. Digital twin-based manufacturing systems, as a typical representative of smart manufacturing, have a set of advantages beyond the traditional ones, such as verifying and predicting the manufacturing system performance based on the operation of a virtual one. This paper presents a five-dimensional digital twin modeling approach for manufacturing systems, which can not only realize the mapping between the physical and virtual twins, but also some of the capabilities and dependencies of the digital twins can be derived. A reconfigurable strategy, based on the expandable model structure and the reserved interfaces of objective functions and optimization algorithms, is proposed to make the digital twin-based manufacturing system satisfy the various reconfigurable requirements of different granularities and targets. Finally, a prototype system is developed to demonstrate the performance of the reconfigurable digital twin-based manufacturing system, which can improve the operation efficiency of such systems for carrying out the reconfiguring production tasks.