Implementation of Digital Twin for Engine Block Manufacturing Processes

The digital twin (DT) is undergoing an increase in interest from both an academic and industrial perspective. Although many authors proposed and described various frameworks for DT implementation in the manufacturing industry context, there is an absence of real-life implementation studies reported...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied sciences Vol. 10; no. 18; p. 6578
Main Authors Bambura, Roman, Šolc, Marek, Dado, Miroslav, Kotek, Luboš
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.09.2020
Subjects
Aluminum
Automation
Automobile industry
Automotive engines
Composite materials
Data acquisition
digital twin
Digital twins
engine block
Engine blocks
Information processing
Manufacturing
Manufacturing industry
Operations management
Optimization
Programmable logic controllers
Real time
Robots
Simulation
Software
Structured Query Language-SQL
Weight reduction
Germany
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Summary:The digital twin (DT) is undergoing an increase in interest from both an academic and industrial perspective. Although many authors proposed and described various frameworks for DT implementation in the manufacturing industry context, there is an absence of real-life implementation studies reported in the available literature. The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate feasibility of the DT implementation under real conditions of a production plant that is specializing in manufacturing of the aluminum components for the automotive industry. The implementation framework of the DT for engine block manufacturing processes consists of three layers: physical layer, virtual layer and information-processing layer. A simulation model was created using the Tecnomatix Plant Simulation (TPS) software. In order to obtain real-time status data of the production line, programmable logic control (PLC) sensors were used for raw data acquisition. To increase production line productivity, the algorithm for bottlenecks detection was developed and implemented into the DT. Despite the fact that the implementation process is still under development and only partial results are presented in this paper, the DT seems to be a prospective real-time optimization tool for the industrial partner.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app10186578