Lightweight digital shadow concept for batch size one products and modular shopfloors

The Digital Twin is seen as the step towards digitalization in many areas, including the area of manufacturing which is the focus of this paper. However, the frequently application-oriented development of concepts and initial implementations make it difficult to adapt them to other applications. Especially when production deviates from the usual highly automated processes and requires high flexibility, e.g. to allow batch size one. In such a case, the Digital Twin must support modular shopfloors with flexible areas in which different production times and various tools and machines are used. It should also be possible to react promptly to problems in production. Design errors that only become apparent during production must be reported directly. In order to deal with this problem, the paper presents a concept for an abstract representation of a Digital Shadow (DS). The DS combines the disciplines of production planning and control, product lifecycle and layout planning which creates new links and enables further application scenarios. Based on this Digital Shadow, different applications can be realized that provide user-related solutions. For this purpose, a tree structure is used that links information about the product and the production environment which in this case is variable.