Digital Twin Technologies in Lean Industry 4.0

Applications for industry

• Prototyping and mock-up designs
• Healthcare facility design and layout optimisation
• Product refinement

Use in the following sectors

• Manufacturing
• Healthcare
• Marketing/Retail

What is a Digital Twin?

A digital twin is a virtualised 3D model of a real-world object or asset designed to be an accurate representation of it. In the context of Lean Industry 4.0 a twin can be used to monitor manufacturing processes, components or systems in real time. This enhanced viewpoint can be used to give a greater understanding of the inner workings of a manufacturing line or process. This can aid in failure rate prediction and even predict future outcomes from this process line.

Benefits of Digital Twins in Lean Industry 4.0

Digital twins give insight into optimisation paths, product quality improvements, traceability of operations and potential pain points in the processes. With the advancement of machine learning technologies these enhancements are even more pronounced as these process optimisations can be driven by derived factors originating from the line itself.

The use of digital twins in Lean Industry can lead to increased reliability of machines on production lines due to the fault predictions elements. They have access to past data and present data allowing them to make educated predictions such as uptime calculations, stock levels, and maintenance cycles. With enough data a simulated twin of a production line can be modified to allow for small batch projection, mass customisation and mixed manufacturing on process lines.

As seen in Figure 1 & 2 we have recreated elements from a manufacturing line for use in a digital twin simulation to allow for virtual reality training in a safe environment for the trainee.

How the Mixed Reality Lab can help

Within the Mixed Reality Lab at Walton Institute, we possess a range of equipment that can aid in the development of digital twins for Lean Industry 4.0.

Mixed Reality Lab, a cutting-edge laboratory exemplifying the latest VR/AR/MR technologies, supporting smart process optimization and lean process analysis. The lab houses the latest state-of-the-art virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) equipment ranging from VR headsets to AR headsets, depth cameras and sensors. AR/VR headsets can be utilised to display Building Information Modelling (BIM) information on digital twin-based representations of buildings and infrastructures. The lab also uses depth camera systems such as standard RGB-D IR (Infrared) cameras to mounted LiDAR (light detection and ranging) and even portable handheld tablet LiDAR for rapid environmental scanning. The lab hosts a range of physiological monitoring equipment with the potential to support assessment of health and safety applications in manufacturing environments. Additionally, the lab is coupled with a HPC (High performance computing) simulation server with the latest Quadro RTX 6000 graphics cards installed capable of processing complex medical data images such as DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine). The lab houses additional compute nodes in the form of the latest Alienware desktops and laptops.

Digital Photogrammetry lab: A 3D / Asset image processing facility applied to holographic based research for enhanced Visualization based applications. It houses a BotSpot Botscan NEO 82 camera scanner rig, which can capture and replicate specific on-site infrastructure via digital photogrammetry for use with either the creation of digital twins for simulation challenges, or for use with interactive AR/VR training simulations. Realistic creation of digital twins can aid in the replication of real-world processes and allow for simulation of optimisations to processes without the need to alter the real-world counterpart, thus allowing for rapid development and deployment of new solutions without prohibitive costs associated with optimising real world processes. The use of recreated infrastructure for use with AR/VR training allow low skilled trainees or apprentices to be able to interact with advanced operations or processes on advanced or potentially dangerous equipment without risk to themselves or others as the training takes place in a virtual simulation environment.

Equipment in the Lab

• AR/VR Headsets – Meta Quest 2/Hololens 2 
• HPC GPU simulation server – Quad Quadro RTX 6000 GPU server 
• LiDAR scanners – Intel Realsense L515, Apple iPad Pro LiDAR