The automatica is the leading international trade fair for intelligent automation and robotics and shows its visitors how they benefit from the digitalization of their production processes. After last year's digital-only and smaller-scale event, the trade fair returned from its corona break from June 21 to 24 and immediately saw a high number of visitors.
The Institute for Industrial Information Technology (inIT) was again represented by the two research assistants André Mankowski and Philip Priss. This year, the focus of the trade fair presentation was on digital twin (DT). Using the VDMA R+A OPC UA demonstrator, the two showed the advantages and added value of a service structure based on digital twins together with their colleagues from industry and VDMA. Numerous components of the decentralized controlled assembly cell for fidget-spinners represented themselves as digital twin and showed the first implementations of various submodels of the asset administration shell, such as the submodel "Nameplate", which provides various manufacturer information in a standardized form, or "TechnicalData" for mapping and describing technical properties and parameters. Individual automation components such as axes, robots and vision systems as well as the assembly cell itself were modeled as DT. The overall objective was to map the use case of service order creation based on the digital twins. A service ticket is automatically generated in a submodel of the DT provided for this purpose. In case of need (e.g., maintenance) the ticket is forwarded to an asset management system, which immediately informs the operating or maintenance personnel about the pending tasks. The corresponding personnel then take care of processing the ticket and acknowledge the service case after it has been processed. After that, this information is automatically played back to the DT.
The use case of a service order illustrated by the demonstrator shows that cross-domain interoperability with support of the DT is already a reality and further advances the transformation of Industry 4.0.