Model-Based Engineering of Multi-Purpose Digital Twins in Manufacturing

The engineering of digital twins for manufacturing can benefit greatly from automated or semi-automated methods, as opposed to the current manual software development methods limited to specific use cases. The manufacturing domain already holds a large amount of data and models that can be used in these engineering processes and during runtime of digital twins. Within this chapter, we show how to apply model-driven engineering methods to the development of digital twins. Specifically, we present the necessary architectural components required for the development of reusable digital twins supporting multiple purposes, as well as the data-to-model and model-to-model transformation methods that can be applied for digital twin engineering. In addition, we discuss the architecture and the runtime use of models in the digital twin, using relevant use cases from the manufacturing domain to illustrate our approach. Overall, we show that model-driven engineering approaches are transferable to engineering digital twins for manufacturing with all its advantages, such as mastering complexity and properly involving domain experts.