A digital twin design and implementation approach for industrial application leveraging programmable logic controllers

The Digital Twin allows the merging of the physical and virtual worlds, having many applications in design and manufacturing. While the Digital Twin conceptual foundations are well developed, and fundamental integration technology is available, there is a gap related to generally applicable Digital Twin implementation approaches. Motivated by this, the paper presents a novel Digital Twin design and implementation approach that considers standard industrial automation technologies. The proposed approach relies on a solution architecture positioning Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) as a central element for Digital Twin deployment for industrial applications. The solution architecture enables a direct connection between the PLC and the Digital Twin platform. The proposal was applied to implement a pneumatic crane for remote operation based on Digital Twin. The assessment demonstrates adequacy in describing implementation activities independently of the specific equipment features, indicating an opportunity for extension to other cases and situations. Thus, the proposed Digital Twin implementation approach can serve as a case reference to support Digital Twin dissemination in practice.