A Multicore Control System Architecture as an Operating Platform for Industrial Digital Twins

Digital Twins are seen as one of the core technologies and enablers of Industrie 4.0. There are various definitions of the term Digital Twin, but most agree that they are digital representations supporting the real production system throughout its lifecycle by providing models, data-integration and online-optimization. Currently, there are no implementations of Digital Twins to be used productively, which fulfill all parts of this definition. This work focuses on the simulation part of Digital Twins and the real-time requirements which arises from an online calculation. An approach that uses models of virtual commissioning, which are integrated in an industrial controller to tackle the problem of real-time calculation is presented. To enable the online simulation of complex and multi-physical models the simulation is parallelized and calculated on a multicore processor.