Digital Twin: Network Provisioning of Mission Critical Communication in Cyber Physical Production Systems

Digital Twin (DT) is widely used in various industrial sectors to optimize the operations and maintenance of physical assets, system and manufacturing processes. This paper applies the DT concept on analyzing the effects of network on the control of a real robot where its DT runs in a complex robot cell executing agile tasks. We present the design steps applied to reach a realizable DT in the Gazebo environment. We evaluate our proposed method with real network configurations against a fully simulated scenario solving the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC) [1]. The evaluation results show that for low delay setups the simulation provides accurate results. For high delay setups the DT should be used for network assessment. It is also shown that 5G Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) is required for the best productivity performance of the robot cell, while the evaluated public LTE+ network can also be used with limited overall accuracy. The DT in action can be seen on [2].