Digital Twin Preparation for the Prototyping Phase, a Use Case

Abstract

Digital Twin (DT) is a growing topic within the manufacturing industry. Moreover, early adoption of a Digital Twin is believed to benefit the rest of the product’s life cycle, like production, maintenance, and recycling. As the physical counterpart of the product is built only in the prototyping phase, this step is thought to be the first phase of a Digital Twin. Still, it necessitates preparation to reduce time-to-market and hence the development costs. This paper shows the result of a Digital Twin preparation before the implementation on the prototype. This consists of creating a Digital Twin from the prototype of a complex logistic plant with a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) tool, and a dummy Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPCUA) server communicating with each other. The methodology used is described with the use case of a logistic system simulated with an OPCUA Server on a Raspberry Pi. Although this work is specific to a particular use case, other researches may profit from the methodology applied and the experiences gathered for implementing a Digital Twin in the early phases of product development.