Harnessing the Potential of Hybrid Virtual Commissioning for Enhanced Educational Ecosystems

Digitalization has brought numerous opportunities to the manufacturing industry as well as learning factories. The incorporation of digital twins into their concept has opened a way to create a virtually unlimited number of learning opportunities. There are, however, many variables that need to be considered when incorporating new equipment in a learning or real-world factory. These include effectiveness, feasibility, cost, time, and in particular, sustainability of the digital solution from a long-term perspective. Creating a digital representation of real-world equipment is often a time-consuming and labour-intensive process. Some equipment may not even be practical to model because of the complexity and used technology, and thus the functionality of the digital twin can be limited. The use of the hybrid virtual commissioning approach can overcome such limitations by integrating data from real devices into the virtual world. Combined with user-friendly modelling and simulation software to build a virtual factory, such as Factory IO, hybrid virtual commissioning can provide opportunities to effectively create numerous study cases with various levels of difficulty that include physical and virtual devices. In this paper, we demonstrate how to exploit the methodology of hybrid virtual commissioning during the process of creating a learning factory demonstrator designed for PLC programming, where the learning factory curriculum aims to enrich the fundamental knowledge of students and provides opportunities for hands-on learning experience. The adaptability of models and curriculum based on the required level of difficulty can also contribute to the sustainability of such demonstrators in a learning factory.