Consistency check to synchronize the Digital Twin of manufacturing automation based on anchor points

Increasing product variety and the shortening of product lifecycles require a fast and inexpensive reconfiguration of existing manufacturing automation systems. To face this challenge one solution is a Digital Twin, which can be used to reduce the complexity and time of reconfiguration by early detection of design or process sequence errors of the system with a cross-domain simulation. For engineering the Digital Twin and systemically synchronizing the data of mechatronic components in the interdisciplinary engineering models of a Digital Twin during the life cycle of manufacturing automation systems, this paper presents a concept for the engineering of a Digital Twin based on model integration in a PLM IT-Platform and an Anchor-Point method to systematically detect variances of the mechatronic data structure between the digital models and the physical system. The data of a mechatronic component from interdisciplinary domains, developed by the corresponding engineering tools are referred to as anchor points. This paper analyses domain-specific challenges in automation software-code to develop an assistance system for rule-based consistency check and for synchronizing the engineering models of the Digital Twin of the manufacturing automation system based on the Anchor-Point method. 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 51st CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems.