Digital twin driven disturbance management in assembly systems

Uncertain events easily break the connection between production and intralogistics, impeding the assembly of customized products. Intralogistics consists of pre-production intralogistics (material feeding) and post-production intralogistics (final product transporting). This issue is defined as a dualistic production-intralogistics synchronization control (DPiLSynC) problem. Existing disturbance-solving approaches are hard to capture the disturbance evolution. Although the temporal network has been used to address production or intralogistics problems, it is underutilized to explore disturbance propagation analysis for DPiLSynC. A novel out-of-order execution (OoOE) approach is adopted to solve the problem. Firstly, the OoO operation logic is extended for DPiLSynC. Secondly, a digital twin driven OoO framework is designed. Thirdly, a methodology of disturbance propagation analysis with temporal network is proposed to facilitate DPiL synchronization. Computation results show that the proposed method can greatly shorten order delivery time, decrease waiting time in the workshop, and improve job simultaneity. Thereby, it displays that the method can maintain DPiL connectivity in a disturbance environment.