Digital Twins of production systems - Automated validation and update of material flow simulation models with real data

Um eine gute Wirtschaftlichkeit und Nachhaltigkeit zu erzielen, müssen Produktionssysteme über lange Zeiträume mit einer hohen Produktivität betrieben werden. Dies stellt produzierende Unternehmen insbesondere in Zeiten gesteigerter Volatilität, die z.B. durch technologische Umbrüche in der Mobilität, sowie politischen und gesellschaftlichen Wandel ausgelöst wird, vor große Herausforderungen, da sich die Anforderungen an das Produktionssystem ständig verändern. Die Frequenz von notwendigen Anpassungsentscheidungen und folgenden Optimierungsmaßnahmen steigt, sodass der Bedarf nach Bewertungsmöglichkeiten von Szenarien und möglichen Systemkonfigurationen zunimmt. Ein mächtiges Werkzeug hierzu ist die Materialflusssimulation, deren Einsatz aktuell jedoch durch ihre aufwändige manuelle Erstellung und ihre zeitlich begrenzte, projektbasierte Nutzung eingeschränkt wird. Einer längerfristigen, lebenszyklusbegleitenden Nutzung steht momentan die arbeitsintensive Pflege des Simulationsmodells, d.h. die manuelle Anpassung des Modells bei Veränderungen am Realsystem, im Wege. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die Entwicklung und Umsetzung eines Konzeptes inkl. der benötigten Methoden, die Pflege und Anpassung des Simulationsmodells an die Realität zu automatisieren. Hierzu werden die zur Verfügung stehenden Realdaten genutzt, die aufgrund von Trends wie Industrie 4.0 und allgemeiner Digitalisierung verstärkt vorliegen. Die verfolgte Vision der Arbeit ist ein Digitaler Zwilling des Produktionssystems, der durch den Dateninput zu jedem Zeitpunkt ein realitätsnahes Abbild des Systems darstellt und zur realistischen Bewertung von Szenarien verwendet werden kann. Hierfür wurde das benötigte Gesamtkonzept entworfen und die Mechanismen zur automatischen Validierung und Aktualisierung des Modells entwickelt. Im Fokus standen dabei unter anderem die Entwicklung von Algorithmen zur Erkennung von Veränderungen in der Struktur und den Abläufen im Produktionssystem, sowie die Untersuchung des Einflusses der zur Verfügung stehenden Daten. Die entwickelten Komponenten konnten an einem realen Anwendungsfall der Robert Bosch GmbH erfolgreich eingesetzt werden und führten zu einer Steigerung der Realitätsnähe des Digitalen Zwillings, der erfolgreich zur Produktionsplanung und -optimierung eingesetzt werden konnte. Das Potential von Lokalisierungsdaten für die Erstellung von Digitalen Zwillingen von Produktionssystem konnte anhand der Versuchsumgebung der Lernfabrik des wbk Instituts für Produktionstechnik demonstriert werden

Hybridization of the Digital Twin - Overcoming Implementation Challenges

In the context of Industry 4.0 the concept of the Digital Twin has gained significant momentum in industry as well as academia. Researchers have hypothesized a great number of potential benefits of the concept's usage. However, few real-world implementations have been recorded. This paper addresses the most pressing challenges inhibiting the concept's industrial application. It describes the process of the concept's hybridization to achieve a practical implementation strategy: the Hybrid Digital Twin. Subsequently, a prototype is implemented using a presently operational real-world manufacturing system to substantiate the viability of the methodology. Finally, the benefits, remaining issues and future developments of the concept are discussed

A Review of Building Information Modeling and Simulation as Virtual Representations Under the Digital Twin Concept

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a highly promising technique for achieving digitalization in the construction industry, widely used in modern construction projects for digitally representing facilities. Nevertheless, retains limitations in terms of representing construction operations. The digital twin concept may potentially overcome these limitations and initiate advanced digital transformation in the construction industry as it has revolutionized the product lifecycle management in the manufacturing industry. This research provides a critical review of applying digital twin in the construction industry. Altogether, 140 papers from related journals and databases were reviewed. The digital aspect of twinning consists of BIM and simulation modeling. These two techniques have been used to create virtual or digital representations of actual buildings and real-world construction processes. However, integrating and applying BIM and simulation modeling according to the digital twin concept remains to be fully studied. Comprehensive evaluations of BIM, simulation modeling, and digital twin will provide a well-defined framework for this research, to identify direction and potential for digital twin in the construction industry, thereby progressing to the next level of digitalization and improvement in construction management practice

Hybrid modeling to support the smart manufacturing: concepts, theoretic contributions and real-case applications about Hybrid and Wisdom-based Systems

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Abductive Design of BDI Agent-based Digital Twins of Organizations

For a Digital Twin - a precise, virtual representation of a physical counterpart - of a human-like system to be faithful and complete, it must appeal to a notion of anthropomorphism (i.e., attributing human behaviour to non-human entities) to imitate (1) the externally visible behaviour and (2) the internal workings of that system. Although the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) paradigm was not developed for this purpose, it has been used successfully in human modeling applications. In this sense, we introduce in this thesis the notion of abductive design of BDI agent-based Digital Twins of organizations, which builds on two powerful reasoning disciplines: reverse engineering (to recreate the visible behaviour of the target system) and goal-driven eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) (for viewing the behaviour of the target system through the lens of BDI agents). Precisely speaking, the overall problem we are trying to address in this thesis is to “Find a BDI agent program that best explains (in the sense of formal abduction) the behaviour of a target system based on its past experiences . To do so, we propose three goal-driven XAI techniques: (1) abductive design of BDI agents, (2) leveraging imperfect explanations and (3) mining belief-based explanations. The resulting approach suggests that using goal-driven XAI to generate Digital Twins of organizations in the form of BDI agents can be effective, even in a setting with limited information about the target system’s behaviour

Enabling the Development and Implementation of Digital Twins : Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality

Welcome to the 20th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality (CONVR 2020). This year we are meeting on-line due to the current Coronavirus pandemic. The overarching theme for CONVR2020 is "Enabling the development and implementation of Digital Twins". CONVR is one of the world-leading conferences in the areas of virtual reality, augmented reality and building information modelling. Each year, more than 100 participants from all around the globe meet to discuss and exchange the latest developments and applications of virtual technologies in the architectural, engineering, construction and operation industry (AECO). The conference is also known for having a unique blend of participants from both academia and industry. This year, with all the difficulties of replicating a real face to face meetings, we are carefully planning the conference to ensure that all participants have a perfect experience. We have a group of leading keynote speakers from industry and academia who are covering up to date hot topics and are enthusiastic and keen to share their knowledge with you. CONVR participants are very loyal to the conference and have attended most of the editions over the last eighteen editions. This year we are welcoming numerous first timers and we aim to help them make the most of the conference by introducing them to other participants