A Brief Survey of Creating a Digital Twin Architecture for Virtual Commissioning on the Machine Level

Digitalization is a hot topic today in every business, affecting the whole life cycle of a process or a product. This paper focuses on the design phase of automation systems, especially creating a digital twin of a machine to support the software development of the control system and its virtual commissioning. Different simulation model architectures are introduced, as well as specific use-case. The main objective of this paper is to present three basic types of digital twin architectures for virtual commissioning of production devices and systems. These architectures were investigated and built based on predefined requirements. Collaborative project work for the development of the digital twin and efficiency was defined as one of the requirements. Efficiency is required due to the software and hardware used for the digital twin. Architectures such as centralized, basic distributed and completely distributed were introduced in the paper. Based on the results from observation and testing, the authors recommend using the concept of completely distributed architecture of the digital twin based on the defined requirements. This digital twin architecture separates mechanical engineering and automation engineering with respect to PC stations. Nevertheless, it interconnects them using the standard machine-to-machine software and communication interfaces.