Andreas Löcklin

Abstract

Digital Twins will change how systems and products are engineered and operated. Individual virtual representations of assets help to develop, maintain and change single components or whole factories. Aerospace engineering, product design and intelligent manufacturing are hot spots for the use of Digital Twins. Simultaneously, globalized markets lead to a growing awareness of dependability and quality, which increases the importance of verification and validation. The Digital Twin could prove to be key enabler for efficient verification and validation processes. This paper presents the results of the literature review of approaches that use Digital Twins for verification and validation purposes. Many solutions have been found for a wide range of challenges in various fields of application. This survey discusses the underlying methods and the elements of Digital Twins already in use. Most research approaches focus on simulations and three methodological clusters of approaches sharing similar ideas were identified.

Abstract

Due to the increasing agility in the development process, shorter life cycles, and changing customer and legislator requirements, production systems must be adaptable. In addition to the ability to react flexibly to changing production requirements, the behavior of the production system must be reassured after a change. Formal verification methods are suitable for safeguarding safety-critical functions. However, this requires a high modeling effort, which inhibits the use of formal verification methods in practice. For reliable verification results, the quality and correctness of the models is decisive. Therefore, it is reasonable to analyze the underlying models. This paper presents two promising and mutually complementing approaches for the lifecycle-spanning safeguarding of production systems to overcome the challenges for the verification that a reconfiguration of the production systems brings with it during operation.

Abstract

Flexible intralogistics systems use automated guided vehicles (AGV) to transport goods. In assembly and warehouses, AGVs and human workers often work side by side. For optimal navigation, AGVs must consider human movement and estimate future positions of workers. Using real-time locating systems (RTLS) to improve human-robot collaboration enables more energy-efficient and safer AGV wayfinding strategies. This paper gives a summary on the topics RTLS, AGV wayfinding and trajectory prediction and introduces the momentum-based approach to predicting future worker positions in factories and warehouses. The results show that ultra-wideband-based RTLS are very well suited for trajectory prediction in the production sector.

Abstract

Manufacturing individual products requires individual production. To implement the production of unique products with traditional engineering approaches is thoroughly complex. Therefore, decentralized production systems on the basis of cyber physical systems (CPS) promise a realization schema and thereby, the reduction of the overall systems’ complexity. Cyber physical systems are rather more complex in communication, time requirements and coordination, but are less complex from a modularization point of view and enable new ways of diagnosis and maintenance. The digitalization of production and new concepts of Industry 4.0 enable direct machine to machine communication, exchange of information and making of common decisions. An approach for future manufacturing in which individual products are scheduled incrementally is presented in this paper. In the presented approach, the product invites itself production resources to offer process steps in an auction. The product automatically ranks the offers according to requirements which are predefined by the customer. The best bids are asked to optimize their offers within a negotiation process. To evaluate our approach, a software-agent based demonstrator was implemented.