Digital Twins Collaboration in Industrial Manufacturing

Digital twins (DTs) play a vital role in achieving the vision of Industry 4.0. They have been used to facilitate business and maximize profits by providing up-to-date operational data representation of physical assets to manage manufacturing machines’ performance, effectiveness, and quality. Creating a DT requires different elements, including IoT sensors, communications networks, connectivity, and digital platforms. Thanks to blockchain, AI, big data, computing paradigms, and automaton technologies, the DT can receive continuous, real-time data and predict the potential risks within the cyber-world. Moreover, the DTs can help in production within industrial manufacturing by easing collaboration among different things (i.e. people, nodes, machines, devices, etc.) on the factory floor. The DTs collaboration plays a significant role in achieving higher quality production, improving decision-making, and saving labour costs. Substantially, the DTs collaboration is still mostly at a conceptual stage to demonstrate wide industrial adoption and become well-defined engineering practice within the industry. Consequently, this chapter has introduced a lightweight framework of DTs collaboration for industrial manufacturing. The framework aims to empower more intelligent and collaborative solutions based on DTs for industrial manufacturing. Furthermore, we describe how the framework can be applied for three industrial manufacturing use cases: energy, railway, and logistics. Finally, we highlighted the future directions to guide interested researchers in this interesting area.