Handling Digital Thread Information to Bridge the Gap Between Design and Manufacturing

Industry 4.0 is a common term nowadays, but in reality, there are still sectors where Industry 4.0 is still in the beginning, such as manufacturing large-scale components or one-of-a-kind production. Here, many complex parts and components are still fabricated and checked manually by workers. This paper focuses on a digitalised mapping for large-scale components, particularly on a use case in the shipyard environment - on an application on how to handle digital thread information and implement this knowledge to digitalise the manufacturing processes. In the context of joining two standardised ship segments, occurring piping gaps must be closed using fitting pipes. Both endings of the piping have to be measured and checked, and an individual fitting pipe is fabricated and inserted – work which is still done manually and thus time intensive. The vision is to develop an application to map the digital thread to adopt and automate the fitting pipe design within AutomationML for further usage.