Machine Learning based Digital Twin Framework for Production Optimization in Petrochemical Industry

Digital twins, along with the internet of things (IoT), data mining, and machine learning technologies, offer great potential in the transformation of today’s manufacturing paradigm toward intelligent manufacturing. Production control in petrochemical industry involves complex circumstances and a high demand for timeliness; therefore, agile and smart controls are important components of intelligent manufacturing in the petrochemical industry. This paper proposes a framework and approaches for constructing a digital twin based on the petrochemical industrial IoT, machine learning and a practice loop for information exchange between the physical factory and a virtual digital twin model to realize production control optimization. Unlike traditional production control approaches, this novel approach integrates machine learning and real-time industrial big data to train and optimize digital twin models. It can support petrochemical and other process manufacturing industries to dynamically adapt to the changing environment, respond in a timely manner to changes in the market due to production optimization, and improve economic benefits. Accounting for environmental characteristics, this paper provides concrete solutions for machine learning difficulties in the petrochemical industry, e.g., high data dimensions, time lags and alignment between time series data, and high demand for immediacy. The approaches were evaluated by applying them in the production unit of a petrochemical factory, and a model was trained via industrial IoT data and used to realize intelligent production control based on real-time data. A case study shows the effectiveness of this approach in the petrochemical industry.