An inceptive approach for designing simple digital twins and industrial metaverse process frameworks for small manufacturing I5.0 environments using Node-RED

Abstract Since the ascent of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), the industrial sector has experienced an unprecedented technological explosion. The current industrial revolution, Industry 5.0 (I5.0), builds on existing I4.0 technological advancements while re-introducing the human factor across production lifecycles. Under I5.0, state-of-the-art technologies for the interaction of physical and virtual, like digital twin (DT), generating virtual models of physical entities and metaverse, creating a reliable virtual space for the interaction, can facilitate the implementation of human-centric solutions for factories. The abundance of information to effectively build and implement these two concepts increases their complexity, calling for specialized studies. Although various research is emerging in this regard, they do not specifically focus on the application of DT and metaverse for small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) environments suffering from slow adoption of new technologies due to the lack of affordable applications adapted to their systems and technology acceptance, implying the fear of drastic technological changes. Our study addresses this issue by proposing a framework as an initial foundation to design simple DT and an industrial metaverse in small manufacturing plants using open-source tools like Node-RED for modeling DT processes and generating the industrial metaverse platform dashboard empowered by Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) communication protocol and Cloudflare tunnel for remote accessibility. Our framework includes detailed steps to extract helpful information from observable assets to build DTs. We apply our framework design in a human-centric case study showing the integration of three DT processes in a single industrial metaverse platform where all business stakeholders, customers, factories, and suppliers contribute to creating a transparent and robust business lifecycle meeting critical I5.0 characteristics.