AN INDUSTRIAL APPLICATION OF DIGITAL TWIN FOR A SMART FACTORY MODEL USING COPPELIASIM

A digital twin is quickly becoming a necessary component of manufacturing. When combined with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, it is possible to fulfil Industry 4.0's requirement for a digital transformation to create a smart factory. Many IoT devices, such as sensors, detect physical phenomena in their environments, collect data, and communicate. Digital twins that mimic the features and capabilities of real physical IoT devices can also be realized. Digitalization using digital twin requires not only IoT sensors but also software tools for virtualization. However, there are limited number of practical applications for the digitalization of large and complex systems. In this work, a smart factory model is used to develop its digital twin. Because the simulation software of industrial automation system manufacturers is licensed and different systems are incompatible with each other for digital twin, CoppeliaSim digital twin software, which is open source and can work independently of the industrial automation system model, was used in this study. The corresponding physical sensor data is transferred to CoppeliaSim in real time. Moreover, three scenarios were realized by achieving bilateral data transmission and control between the physical and digital twin models. Instant status monitoring presents the performance of digital twinning. While most of the digital twin studies in the literature are carried out either by transferring data only from the virtual system to the physical system or only from the physical system to the virtual system, in this study, simultaneous data exchange was implemented between the real and virtual systems.