Towards Integrated Digital Twins for Industrial Products: Case Study on an Overhead Crane

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things practitioners are adopting the concept of digital twins at an accelerating pace. The features of digital twins range from simulation and analysis to real-time sensor data and system integration. Implementation examples of modeling-oriented twins are becoming commonplace in academic literature, but information management-focused twins that combine multiple systems are scarce. This study presents, analyzes, and draws recommendations from building a multi-component digital twin as an industry-university collaboration project and related smaller works. The objective of the studied project was to create a prototype implementation of an industrial digital twin for an overhead crane called “Ilmatar”, serving machine designers and maintainers in their daily tasks. Additionally, related cases focus on enhancing operation. This paper describes two tools, three frameworks, and eight proof-of-concept prototypes related to digital twin development. The experiences show that good-quality Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are significant enablers for the development of digital twins. Hence, we recommend that traditional industrial companies start building their API portfolios. The experiences in digital twin application development led to the discovery of a novel API-based business network framework that helps organize digital twin data supply chains.

BIM-Based Digital Twin and XR Devices to Improve Maintenance Procedures in Smart Buildings: A Literature Review

“…One of the first improvements highlighted by the researchers concerns the global monitoring of the building and its equipment. Thanks to the centralised database provided by the DT, the different stakeholders obtain easier access to data related to the equipment they want to monitor [16,22,26,34,35,39,43,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]. For example, Peng et al created a specific platform that allowed them to visualise in real time both the status of all the equipment in a hospital and the occupation of its different rooms [35].…”

“…The specification of the data needed to effectively evaluate the system can be performed by the different actors of the project using the centralised DT. It allows for collaboration, allowing all the actors to contribute their own expertise in the data they need to effectively monitor the building [26,34,44,51]. Varé et al have proposed a digital representation of a nuclear container that can be used by different teams (research, measurement and engineering) to exchange the information they need [51].…”

“…The data displayed can either be static or collected in real-time from the system (e.g., technical documentation of an equipment, time series of data collected by smart sensors, aand instructions for maintenance procedures) [26,43,53,55,64,67,68,70,72,73,77,78]. Most of the time, the selection of the data is done manually by an expert [25,53,69,73].…”

“…This type is mainly used to provide an immersive environment for its user, leaving his or her hands free to interact with the real environment. There are two main subtypes of HMD that can be found in the literature: the optical and/or video see-through HMDs, which let the user see the real-word with immersive augmentations [25,26,43,47,66,67,[70][71][72][73]75,78,80] (see Figure 6b), and the occluded HMDs, where the user is entirely immersed in a virtual environment [25,47,75,78,79] (see Figure 6c). While the occluded HMDs are mainly seen as VR devices, the see-through HMDs are mostly used for AR and MR applications.…”

“…According to Gartner, the use of these technologies has increased in the last year, thanks to the recent performance improvements and the miniaturisation of mobile devices. These improvements have allowed the implementation of MR devices, which were first defined in 1994 [24] and can be seen as improved AR devices with which the user can interact both with the digital and physical elements using intuitive interaction methods (e.g., information appeared according to user's position in space [25], take control of physical equipment through the use of the device [26]).…”