Digital twin and virtual reality: a co-simulation environment for design and assessment of industrial workstations

In the context of the Industry 4.0 and of the digital factory, digital twin and virtual reality represent key technologies to design, simulate and optimize cyber-physical production system and interact with it remotely or in a collaborative way. Moreover, these technologies open up new possibilities which can be involved in the co-design and ergonomics studies of workstations, based on Industry 4.0 components like cobots. In order to satisfy these needs and to create dynamic and immersive virtual environment, it is therefore necessary to combine the capacities of the digital twin to perform simulation of the production system with the capacities of the immersive virtual environment in term of interactions. This paper proposes a co-simulation and communication architecture between digital twin and virtual reality software, then it presents a use case on a human-robot collaborative workplace design and assessment.