Royal Society International Exchanges Cost Share (Italy): A mathematical foundation for dynamic information flow across multi-scale digital models of future smart manufacturing systems

A digital twin is the virtual counterpart of a real manufacturing system. The role of the digital twin, for smart manufacturing, is to support methods and tools to predict and control the real system. The digital twin also needs to deal with a continuous flow of information coming from the real system in the form of big data, asking for appropriate communication technologies and flows. Such complexity can be reduced first by designing the twin under a ladder of abstraction, where each abstraction represents a level of focus (or fidelity). The challenge is to go up and down the ladder in a steady and secure manner. We propose to develop mathematical foundations to guide the system while manoeuvring safely and efficiently on the digital ladder. Such mathematical tools enable the digital twin to zoom in and out between two models in a rigorous manner, while the change of one will be synchronised to the other. The key advantage of these tools is that multiple tools can be composed together in various ways, making the information flows across multi-level efficient and easy to manage even in the most complex cases. Under such supporting mechanism of information flow, the complexity of designing and operating a digital twin will be greatly reduced, whilst efficiency and accuracy can be improved, therefore saving both labour and computational costs. It will also give us insight into how to build a digital ladder which is both strong and easy to use.