Enhancing Digital Twins of Semi-Automatic Production Lines by Digitizing Operator Skills

In recent years, Industry 4.0 has provided many tools to replicate, monitor, and control physical systems. The purpose is to connect production assets to build cyber-physical systems that ensure the safety, quality, and efficiency of production processes. Particularly, the concept of digital twins h...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied sciences 2023-02, Vol.13 (3), p.1637
Main Authors: Lago Alvarez, Angela, Mohammed, Wael M., Vu, Tuan, Ahmadi, Seyedamir, Martinez Lastra, Jose Luis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Assembly lines
Cyber-physical systems
data-driven modeling
digital twin
Digital twins
Digitization
Digitizing
Factories
Human factors
Human performance
industrial application
Industrial Revolution
Industry 4.0
Job performance
Job rotation
Literature reviews
Manufacturing
Performance assessment
Production lines
Productivity
Scheduling
Skills
Workers
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Summary:In recent years, Industry 4.0 has provided many tools to replicate, monitor, and control physical systems. The purpose is to connect production assets to build cyber-physical systems that ensure the safety, quality, and efficiency of production processes. Particularly, the concept of digital twins has been introduced to create the virtual representation of physical systems where both elements are connected to exchange information. This general definition encompasses a series of major challenges for the developers of those functionalities. Among them is how to introduce the human perspective into the virtual replica. Therefore, this paper presents an approach for incorporating human factors in digital twins. This approach introduces a methodology to offer suggestions about employee rotations based on their previous performance during a shift. Afterward, this method is integrated into a digital twin to perform human performance assessments to manage workers’ jobs. Furthermore, the presented approach is mainly comprised of a human skills modelling engine and a human scheduling engine. Finally, for demonstrating the approach, a simulated serial single-product manufacturing assembly line has been introduced.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app13031637