A Framework for Enabling Cyber-Twins based Industry 4.0 Application Development

Industry 4.0 applications aim to improve industrial efficiency, product consistency, and related supply chains by providing smart, data-driven solutions that involve machines, processes, workers, and products. This paper proposes Cyber Twins (CTs) for Industry 4.0 application development and a CT-based framework that reduces the cost/effort of Industry 4.0 application development by providing: 1) a CT ontology for describing industrial machines, including their sensors, actuators, settings and automation/control functions, 2) machine emulation/simulation for testing, and 3) services for generating CTs from their semantic descriptions, CT-based communication with machines, and CT integration across Industry 4.0 applications. We present a proof-of-concept CT framework implementation and introduce a cost model to compute the costs of CT-based Industry 4.0 application development and compare this with the cost of applications that use other existing digital twins. Via these, we measure the benefits of CT-based application development in a real-world use case from the milk processing industry.