Smart cyber-physical production system enabled workpiece production in digital twin job shop

Abstract

Industry 4.0 describes the future production of workpiece in job shop as: the workpiece is a smart one; it knows the details of how to manufacture itself; and it can communicate with manufacturing environment to support its own machining processes. This means that the production of workpiece places more emphasis on the smart realization of the process level in Industry 4.0. However, how to implement the production scenario based on existing technologies has not yet been well studied. On account of this, this article aims to study how to use existing technologies in job shop such as digital twins, Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-physical Production System (CPPS), etc., to realize the workpiece-driven process-level production. The process-level production of a workpiece is divided into three stages according to the different manufacturing resources involved. On this basis, the production of the workpiece in digital twin job shop is divided into process level, operation level, and IoT/sensor level. Firstly, the manufacturing requirements at process level are generated according to production planning and process sheet. And these requirements are written into RFID tag of the workpiece. The workpiece dynamically interacts with different workstations via RFID reader/antenna in order to complete the manufacturing requirements. Secondly, based on the tag data, the interaction model of operation level, and IoT/sensor level CPPSs is given. Thirdly, at IoT/sensor level, the RFID devices are treated as a CPPS to track the manufacturing resources. And different smart sensors are used as independent sensor CPPSs to monitor the running status of machine tool. The RFID and sensor CPPSs are triggered by operation level CPPSs. Finally, a digital twin job shop is taken as an example to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed models and methods.