In Germany, industrial buildings account for approximately 15% of heating energy, despite comprising only 2% of the total building stock. This makes this sector particularly important for achieving climate neutrality. Heat losses are not solely due to poor building insulation; they can also be attributed to other factors. A significant proportion comes from the opening of doors during material deliveries. An intelligent control system requires both predictive forecasts, such as heat simulations and performance forecasts, as well as information from external systems, including work schedules and transport arrivals. In addition, depending on the situation, there are sometimes competing target functions, such as grid-friendliness versus economic efficiency. The open-source Industrie 4.0 automation technology BaSyx ( https://eclipse.dev/basyx ) has proven effective in orchestrating such a system. It uses the concept of the asset administration shell to describe both physical and digital goods (assets) in a standardized way and make them available as so-called digital twins. Together with a semantic description of the data and services, digital twins enable interoperable data exchange. Decentralized infrared heating systems offer clear advantages in terms of energy efficiency when heating halls, as they transfer heat to the usable area almost loss-free, precisely, and quickly, without generating heat buildup under the hall roof. Additionally, the heating system can flexibly adapt to changing hall-specific usage conditions, such as door openings and shifts in crane runway positions. State-of-the-art multi-energy infrared heating systems use various energy sources, including gas and electricity, to generate infrared heat. Some of the radiant heaters considered here can switch between gas and electricity operation depending on the availability of photovoltaic power. However, there are numerous other possibilities, such as dynamic electricity prices and (short-term) weather forecasts for energy control. To fully leverage the energy-saving potential of modern multi-energy infrared heating systems, innovative software solutions must be developed and implemented for their operation that account for both the possibilities mentioned above and their interaction with other components. Digital twins are an essential building block in this direction. We developed, in close collaboration with the heater manufacturer’s team, Industrie 4.0-compliant digital twins for their industrial infrared radiant heaters. We used BaSyx to model the Asset Administration Shell, incorporating several sub-models. For one of these sub-models, we developed a scoring system to evaluate the energy efficiency of industrial halls and their sections. This scoring system analyzed operating data from heating appliances at selected customers to provide heating efficiency information on a monitoring dashboard. In the future, this data could serve as the basis for enhancing the selection and placement of heaters in industrial halls. It is possible to determine whether appliances are oversized or undersized in their use, thereby achieving better planning for future projects and the associated conservation of resources. We developed a mixed-reality application for the HoloLens 2 that enables the virtual placement of heating appliances in the real world. Furthermore, we present initial concepts for accessing the sub-models and data of the digital twin in natural language, paving the way for the Industrial Metaverse.
Brandherm et al. (Thu,) studied this question.