Digital Twin of manufacturing systems: a case study on increasing the efficiency of reconfiguration

The added value of a Digital Twin for reconfiguring manufacturing systems promises an increase in system availability, a reduction in set-up and conversion times and enables the manufacturing of customer-specific products. To evaluate this claim, this paper selects an architecture of the Digital Twin and realizes it on the basis of an application scenario for a cyber-physical manufacturing system. A case study is used to test the reconfiguration of a manufacturing system by comparing two different methods, one without and one with use of the Digital Twin. In this paper, the process steps of both reconfigurations are described and discussed in detail and a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the reconfiguration results is presented. Finally, this paper gives an outlook on future research on intelligent automation of manufacturing systems using the Digital Twin.