Lifecycle management and smart manufacturing: Modelling and implementation to utilize the digital twin

Abstract: Smart manufacturing – smart factories creating smart products – is a topic which has arisen in the academic as well as business community. This thesis covers smart manufacturing in the context of lifecycle management. The thesis investigated how the standard Product Life Cycle Support (PLCS) could be used to support smart manufacturing and mainly how to develop the underlying system and information infrastructure. Standards, reports and specifications for smart manufacturing were investigated. Several information models were created from these publications which could be used for implementing a proposed solution for the infrastructure.The implementation concerned a use case in the ongoing research project DigIn, and used the developed models to implement a proposed solution in the product lifecycle management software ShareAspace. This was done in order to evaluate how to use the functionality of PLCS and ShareAspace to utilize the solution to support smart manufacturing and update the digital twin. In parallel to this thesis, a sub-project part of the DigIn project was conducted which connected the database to other software in the system as well as to the factory shop floor. The solution used the plant service bus Kafka and REST APIs in order to establish the connection. The functionality of the system regarding the specified required functionality in the publications was then investigated.The solution was found to meet most of the requirements of the publications regarding, among others, lifecycle management, service oriented architecture, non-hierarchical structures and communication capabilities.