[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=“Twin Planning: Virtual and Real Factory Planning“ font_container=“tag:h2|font_size:38|text_align:left|color:%23e30613″ use_theme_fonts=“yes“ css=“.vc_custom_1521534872617{margin-top: -25px !important;}“][vc_column_text]Ein Beitrag von: Lai Xu, Giacomo Cabri, Marco Aiello, Massimo Mecella & Paul de Vrieze, EU-Project FIRST
[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“Kurz und bündig:“ font_container=“tag:h3|font_size:17|text_align:left|color:%23ffffff“ use_theme_fonts=“yes“ css=“.vc_custom_1519747666609{padding-left: 15px !important;background-color: #f07d00 !important;}“][vc_column_text css=“.vc_custom_1521550001013{border-top-width: 1px !important;border-right-width: 1px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;border-left-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 10px !important;padding-right: 10px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;padding-left: 10px !important;background-color: #eaeaea !important;border-left-color: #aaaaaa !important;border-left-style: solid !important;border-right-color: #aaaaaa !important;border-right-style: solid !important;border-top-color: #aaaaaa !important;border-top-style: solid !important;border-bottom-color: #aaaaaa !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;border-radius: 1px !important;}“]

Wie kann die Planung eines digitalen Zwillings erfolgreich sein? Die Autoren sehen hier drei essentielle Faktoren, welche der Artikel näher erörtert. Zunächst müssen Fabrik Equipment und Software Applikationen kompatibel sein. Des Weiteren muss die IT-Infrastruktur die Zusammenführung von fabrikinternen Komponenten ermöglichen und schließlich muss die Business-Strategie nach der IT-Strategie ausgerichtet werden.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=“.vc_custom_1519752670572{margin-top: -10px !important;}“][vc_column][vc_column_text]

The manufacturing industry is entering on a new era in which information and communication technologies (ICT) and collaboration applications are integrated with traditional manufacturing practices and processes to increase exibility of production, mass customization, speed, quality and time to failure. To cope with the rapidity of change in today’s markets, frequent updates of the planning are needed. As such the planning needs to be adaptive, dynamic and resilient to failures. Building a virtual model of the factory and applying explicit planning to it can help in achieving a more effective planning in the actual factory.

[/vc_column_text][ult_dualbutton btn_hover_style=“Style 2″ btn_border_style=“solid“ btn_color_border=“#ffffff“ btn_border_size=“2″ btn_alignment=“left“ dual_resp=“off“ button1_text=“Einzelheft kaufen“ icon_link=“url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aws-institut.de%2Fim-io%2Fproduct%2Fdigitaler-zwilling%2F|||“ btn1_background_color=“#f07d00″ btn1_bghovercolor=“#e30613″ icon=“Defaults-book“ icon_size=“22″ icon_color=“#ffffff“ icon_hover_color=“#f07d00″ button2_text=“Jetzt abonnieren“ btn_icon_link=“url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aws-institut.de%2Fim-io%2Fabo%2F|||“ btn2_background_color=“#f07d00″ btn2_bghovercolor=“#e30613″ btn_icon=“Defaults-chevron-right“ btn_icon_size=“22″ btn_icon_color=“#ffffff“ btn_iconhover_color=“#f07d00″ divider_text=“oder“ divider_text_color=“#f07d00″ divider_bg_color=“#ffffff“ btn1_text_color=“#ffffff“ btn1_text_hovercolor=“#ffffff“ btn2_text_color=“#ffffff“ btn2_text_hovercolor=“#ffffff“ title_font_size=“desktop:20px;“ btn_border_radius=“3″ title_line_ht=“desktop:22px;“ btn_width=“280″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Two main forces are driving major changes in modern factories. The first one being the high degree of globalization. Factories have an increasing need to efficiently collaborate with their suppliers and their customers, possibly all over the world. The second is the fact that the degree of automation and digitalization has reached unprecedented levels. Factory production equipment is not only producing data at high frequency, but it is also driven in an automated and integrated way. This calls for an accurate and comprehensive planning of modern factory production processes. Planning entails the precise enactment of all the processes, procedures or applications which concur to the overall production of goods. To cope with the rapidity of change in today’s markets frequent updates of the planning is needed. As such the planning needs to be adaptive, dynamic and resilient to failures. Building a virtual model of the factory and applying explicit planning to it can help in achieving a more effective planning in the actual factory.

[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“Virtual Factories“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]

The manufacturing industry is entering a new era in which information and communication technologies (ICT) and collaboration applications are integrated with traditional manufacturing practices and processes to increase flexibility of production, mass customization, speed, quality and time to failure. Virtual factory models can be created before the real factory is implemented to better explore design options, evaluate their performance and commit the automation systems, thus saving time-to-production [3]. This foundational concept to future manufacturing allows the flexible amalgamation of manufacturing resources in multiple organizations to model, simulate, test factory layouts and processes in a virtual environment. As a result, the actual factory can be created in a shorter time with demand-driven product lines or to simulate the desired factory be generated before committing to investment. Moreover, the virtual factory approach can be exploited when the real factory has already been implemented, in order to better manage it by means of a virtual model that represents it; this is particularly useful in manufacturing factories, where modifications in the field require careful evaluations.

As pointed out in the “Factories of the Future 2020 Roadmap” [3], pre-requisites for proper manufacturing integration include the need for agreements on industrial communication interfaces and protocols, common data models and the semantic interoperability of data, and thus on a larger scale, platform inter-communication and inter-operability. The achievement of these objectives will allow a boundary-less information flow among the single product lifecycle phases in turn enabling an effective, whole-of-life Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Indeed, the most significant obstacle is that valuable information is not readily shared with other interested parties across the Beginning-of-Life (BoL), Middle-of-Life (MoL), and End-of-Life (EoL) lifecycle phases but it is mainly locked into vertical applications, the so-called silos.

[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“Technological challenges“ font_container=“tag:h4|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]

Kuhn [9] argues that the digital factory concept, where all aspects of the production line are digitized, requires the integration of tools for the design, engineering, planning, simulation, communication, and control at all levels. He suggests that openness and interoperability are the key factors in implementing a digital factory concept. Gregor and Stefan [6] state that a very important property of a digital factory is the ability to integrate process planning and product development using common data. They further suggest that it is important to gain all the required data once and manage it with uniform data control to allow all software systems to utilize it effectively. Overall, they imply that the digital factory is a link between the ‘what’, product development, and the ‘when and who’, process planning, with the use of common data to provide the ‘how’ within the product lifecycle. In the following sections, we point out three key factors to enable the synchronization between virtual and real planning.

[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“Interoperability“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]

The synchronization between virtual and real planning, the “twin-planning”, must be supported by interoperability among the equipment and the software applications of the factory. Too often, on the very same production line, data of one stage is not used by the following stages, in turn increasing the chances of defects and failure in the production.

The systems should be able to communicate, to recognize the context respectively state of production and to make decisions based on the implementation details.

In order to create the digital twin planning and to manage the interoperability of heterogeneous systems throughout the product lifecycle, several approaches could be used [5]:

→ A straightforward but limited approach is where a single overall schema is created that is used by data sources [5]. In this tightly coupled approach any change of an individual system needs to be reflected by an update of the entire overall schema.

→ Object-oriented interoperability approaches are closely related to tightly coupled ones. Different types of these approaches are described in Pitoura, Bukhres, Elmagarmid [13]. Object-oriented interoperability approaches use common data models which have similar problems when dealing with modification of individual systems.

→ Loosely coupled interoperability approaches are more suitable to achieve scalable architectures, modular complexity, robust design, and integration of third party components. Using Web services as communication method is one of such loosely coupled interoperability approaches. A notable extension to Web services are Semantic Web services [10], in which a machine usable meaning allows automation of service use.

→ Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as the main approach for dealing with the challenge of interoperability of systems in heterogeneous environment [16], [17]. SOA offers mechanisms of flexibility and interoperability that allow different technologies to be dynamically integrated, independently of the system’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform in use [7]. Several standards for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) use SOA, such as OMG PLM Services [11], [12].

[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“Service composition“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]

In connection with the interoperability aspect, in a factory “ecosystem” there are many services that support the Product Lifecycle Management. State-of-the-art equipment typically does not only provide data about its own functioning, but also exposes services by which the machines can be programmed and driven. The trend towards programmatically accessible equipment is expected to increase in the near future.

Services can be provided at various levels, from very simple ones to very complex ones; the former are more robust and can be exploited in a wide range of situations; the latter are very specific and do not require a relevant effort to be exploited.

For the planning of manufacturing the available services, in particular the simplest ones, must be composable in order to provide higher-level building blocks to the planners. A number of new challenges need to be addressed: (i) services can be heterogeneous (two teams designing the same service will come up with a different service interface), (ii) the correct service(s) must be discovered, requiring a way to describe services and tools that enable searching for the needed one(s), and (iii) in complex factories the composition should be autonomous and adaptive to actual production context, in order to limit costly and slow human intervention. As an example of an approach addressing these issues, the project “Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems” (SAPERE) is representative [1].

[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“Business and IT alignment“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]

In addition to interoperability, the effectiveness of the virtual planning depends on the alignment between business strategy and IT strategy [14], taking into consideration also social aspects [15]. With the rising importance of innovative digital technologies for performance and competitiveness, the concept of digital business strategies (DBS) emerged [8]. ‘‘The fusion of business and IT strategies is presumed to account for the inevitable transformations that digital technologies triggered. This paradigmatic shift poses new challenges to practitioners and researchers, as current assumptions regarding strategizing processes need to be questioned’’ [8]. Some means are available to enact the alignment between business and IT strategies. For instance, COBIT 5 is a comprehensive framework of globally accepted principles, practices, analytical tools and models that can help any enterprise effectively address critical business issues related to the governance and management of information and technology [2].

[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“Conclusions“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]

Twin planning refers to having two levels of planning in factories: the virtual planning, which is applied to a virtual model of the factory, and the real planning, which is applied to real resources of the factory. The virtual planning enables to apply modifications to the model in order to understand the effects on the real factory without disrupting production. We have pointed out three key factors for successfully implementing twin planning. First, the interoperability among the factory equipment and software applications is needed to synchronize the virtual and the real planning, in particular to allow for the virtual planning to be based on accurate models of the factory. Second, the IT infrastructure must enable the composition of the various components in the factory – enabling planning on a high level; and thirdly the business strategy must be aligned with the IT strategy, in order to drive the planning in a consistent way. The “FIRST”, Horizon 2020-RISEEU-project, already started developing concrete and valid approaches to twin planning and will be investigating the above-mentioned points in the near future.

[/vc_column_text][vc_message message_box_color=“orange“]

EUROPEAN UNION SUPPORTS THE IT-CONCEPTS FOR VIRTUAL FACTORIES

The project “virtual Factories Interoperation suppoRting buSiness innovaTion” (FIRST) provides the new technology and methodology to describe manufacturing assets; to compose and integrate the existing services into collaborative virtual manufacturing processes; and to deal with evolution of changes. From the overarching objective to enhance manufacturing integration through the application of advanced IT solutions, the innovative project brings together an experienced researcher with expertise in the designing an interoperability framework for facilitating interoperability on data/information, services and process levels respectively. These outcomes lead to significant business innovations for virtual factories, made possible by an internationally recognized group expertise in (manufacturing) services/assets description languages, semantic services discover methods, and automated interoperability. The FIRST project will take advantage of this complementary experience as well as the academic and industrial relationships in Europe and China respectively, taking advantage of the unique opportunity to address the concept from both perspectives.

CORDIS Link: bit.ly/2GPtRoK

[/vc_message][ult_createlink title=“Zu den Literaturangaben“ btn_link=“url:http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2sGCZKj|title:Literaturangaben||“ link_hover_style=“Style_1″ text_hovercolor=“#dd9933″][/vc_column][/vc_row]