A Support Tool for Operation Digital Twins Design for High Variety Production Environments: Introducing the PDU Model.

Small and medium-sized production companies face many challenges in decision making about planning, maintenance, and other operational processes due to challenges of high variety in customer demand, configurations of the production processes, technologies used and so on. Operation Digital Twinning is seen as a possible solution to cope with these challenges. However, the variety of influences inside and outside the production process create obstacles, hindering the design of a practical Digital Twin. The twinning system is identified as a socio-technical system where humans and machines work together. In multiple research projects, we identified three factors related to the design obstacles. These are related to 1) the predictability of the system, 2) the detectability of variations in process and environment, and 3) the usability of regulating the physical counterpart of the twin. We combined these three socio-technical factors of Predictability, Detectability and Usability to regulate in the PDU model. This model supports development of Operation Digital Twins to identify issues and steer system design.