Interfacing Digital and Physical Twins with a Microservice Architecture

Abstract: Throughout history, humans have proven to develop and improve their quality of life constantly. Incorporating mechanical principles into otherwise manual labor was one such aspect. Today, introducing mechanization to the industry and steam power is regarded as the first industrial revolution. Since then, a second and a third have followed, introducing concepts such as electricity, automation, computers, and computerization. Finally, in 2011 the fourth industrial revolution was introduced as Industry 4.0 by a project started in Germany, which considers digitalization. Industry 4.0 uses concepts such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing. The goal of these concepts is to be able to further the capabilities of automation in the industry, creating smart factories. A problem experienced today when making changes to the production line is that an immense amount of hard coding is required for the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) controlling the system as well as for the system controlling the factory. The Eclipse Arrowhead Framework addresses these issues by applying a particular set of parameters to all systems within the IT infrastructure. The Arrowheadframework offers parameters such as orchestrator, authorization, and a service registry to each system incorporated within the framework. By applying this, the System of Systems (SoS) and the parameters provided by the Arrowhead framework create a local cloud. In doing so, each system within a factory belongs to its local cloud, building a factory made of a cluster of local clouds. By applying the ideas of Industry 4.0, a proof of concept is created, showing that today’s industry would benefit from using the concepts stated above with digital twins. The thesis explores and proves that, with the help of digital twins, today’s industry can cut down on manufacturing process development. In addition, it reduces the time it takes to apply changes to the production line by enabling machine learning to facilitate human interaction. A model factory created by fischertechnik is used, together with a PLC, as the physical twin in this master thesis. In addition, using Siemens Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software NX, a digital twin is created; this digital twin will communicate with the physical twin to simulate the behavior of the physical twin in real-time. A server has been created and is acting as a hub of communication for both of the twins. The use of the digital twin to communicate with the physical twin will enable tremendous advances in automation regarding industry 4.0.