Digital Twin-Based Factory

Overview

Digital Twin

Despite the growing body of literature on digital twins in smart manufacturing, most studies primarily focus on simulation with either no data exchange or only a one-way flow of data from physical assets to their digital counterparts. To the best of our knowledge, only a few research studies have focused on creating a true digital twin for a factory. A true digital twin is capable of bidirectional data exchange, where the digital replica not only reflects real-time updates and predictions from physical assets but also sends actionable commands back to the physical factory.

digital twin

Subproject 1

IME Smart Manufacturing Lab’s Intelligent Factory: A Novel Paradigm for Enhanced Operations, Predictability, and Safety

 

Goal

The goal of Subproject 1 is to create an Intelligent Factory (IF), which involves physical assets and their digital replica with bidirectional data exchange.

The proposed structure has three layers, which are the subject of this subproject research:

  1. Manufacturing stations and their digital replica
  2. An embedded AI
  3. An intricate bidirectional data flow between physical stations, their digital counter-parts, and the embedded AI

Outcome

The research outcome will provide a methodology and framework for developing a bidirectional digital twin of factories, which can be adapted by different types of manufacturing processes or other engineering applications.

Photo of Zahra Sotoudeh

Principal Investigator

Dr. Zahra Sotoudeh

Dr. Zahra Sotoudeh’s areas of expertise are computational structural dynamics (CSD) and aeroelasticity, and statistical energy analysis. Zahra joined aerospace engineering department in Fall 2016. Zahra is an associate fellow of AIAA. Dr. Sotoudeh is one of the Co-PIs for the CREST-RASM grant.

Research Faculty and Staff

Principal Investigator

Dr. Zahra Sotoudeh

Graduate Researcher

Joshua Sanford

Graduate Researcher

Ariana Shoaf