Heejong Park

Heejong Park, Arvind Easwaran, Sidharta Andalam

The recent advancement of information and communication technology makes digitalisation of an entire manufacturing shop-floor possible where physical processes are tightly intertwined with their cyber counterparts. This led to an emergence of a concept of digital twin, which is a realistic virtual copy of a physical object. Digital twin will be the key technology in Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) and its market is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. Nevertheless, digital twin is still relatively a new concept that people have different perspectives on its requirements, capabilities, and limitations. To better understand an effect of digital twin's operations, mitigate complexity of capturing dynamics of physical phenomena, and improve analysis and predictability, it is important to have a development tool with a strong semantic foundation that can accurately model, simulate, and synthesise the digital twin. This paper reviews current state-of-art on tools and developments of digital twin in manufacturing and discusses potential design challenges.

Heejong Park, Arvind Easwaran, Etienne Borde

In the fields of co-simulation and component-based modelling, designers import models as building blocks to create a composite model that provides more complex functionalities. Modelling tools perform instantaneous cycle detection (ICD) on the composite models having feedback loops to reject the models if the loops are mathematically unsound and to improve simulation performance. In this case, the analysis relies heavily on the availability of dependency information from the imported models. However, the cycle detection problem becomes harder when the model's input to output dependencies are mode-dependent, i.e. changes for certain events generated internally or externally as inputs. The number of possible modes created by composing such models increases significantly and unknown factors such as environmental inputs make the offline (statical) ICD a difficult task. In this paper, an online ICD method is introduced to address this issue for the models used in cyber-physical systems. The method utilises an oracle as a central source of information that can answer whether the individual models can make mode transition without creating instantaneous cycles. The oracle utilises three types of data-structures created offline that are adaptively chosen during online (runtime) depending on the frequency as well as the number of models that make mode transitions. During the analysis, the models used online are stalled from running, resulting in the discrepancy with the physical system. The objective is to detect an absence of the instantaneous cycle while minimising the stall time of the model simulation that is induced from the analysis. The benchmark results show that our method is an adequate alternative to the offline analysis methods and significantly reduces the analysis time.