A Novel Implementation Framework of Digital Twins for Intelligent Manufacturing Based on Container Technology and Cloud Manufacturing Services

Many core technologies of Industry 4.0 have gained substantial advancement in recent years. Digital Twin (DT) has become the key technology and tool for manufacturing industries to realize intelligent cyber-physical integration and digital transformation by leveraging these technologies. Although there have been many DT-related works, there is no standard definition, unified framework, and implementation approach of DT until now. Widely developing DTs for the manufacturing industry is still challenging. Thus, this paper proposes a novel implementation framework of digital twins for intelligent manufacturing, denoted as IF-DTiM, which possesses several distinct merits to distinguish itself from previous works. First, IF-DTiM fully utilizes new-generation container technology so that DT-related applications and services can be packaged in a self-contained way, rapidly deployed, and robustly operated with the capabilities of failover, autoscaling, and load balancing. Second, it leverages existing intelligent cloud manufacturing services to realize the intelligence for DT externally in a scalable and plug-and-play manner instead of using traditional approaches to embed intelligence in DT. Third, IF-DTiM contains Product DT for products, Equipment DT (i.e., EQ DT) for equipment, and Process DT for production lines, which can generically fulfill the demands and scenarios to achieve intelligent manufacturing for various manufacturing industries. Testing results show that IF-DTiM can achieve remarkable performance in rapid deployment and real-time data exchanges of DT-related applications. Finally, we develop an example DTiM system for CNC machining based on IF-DTiM to demonstrate its efficacy and applicability in facilitating the manufacturing industry to build their DT systems. Note to Practitioners - Developing Digital Twin (DT) systems to realize intelligent manufacturing is challenging. The proposed IF-DTiM (Implementation Framework of Digital Twins for Intelligent Manufacturing) provides a novel container-technology and cloud-manufacturing-service-based systematic methodology for building DTiM. In this paper, we present the system architecture and several operational scenarios (e.g., how to create and use DTs) of IF-DTiM, together with the design of its core functional mechanisms (e.g., rapid deployment scheme for DT, real-time data exchange for DT, DT interface pattern, and general workflow architecture for DT). Also, an example DTiM system for CNC machining based on IF-DTiM is presented to facilitate the practitioners to adopt the designs and niches in IF-DTiM to build their desired DTiM systems.