Virtual Supply Chain Creates Digital Twin for Simulations and Optimization

The Applied Research Institute has partnered with Mechanical Sciences and Engineering at Illinois and Digital Manufacturing Design (DMDII) to develop an Operating System for Cyberphysical Manufacturing (OSCM).

OSCM serves as a cloud-based application that links small and medium businesses as well as large manufacturers to customers, thereby creating a cyber-physical marketplace. OSCM also provides the facilities and routes to connects machines to a central management hub and ties the physical machines to its virtual counterparts to provide manufacturers and customers with real time monitoring of the manufacturing process. The work that OSCM is doing allows manufacturers to expose the spare capacity of their machines, which increases revenue.

ARI’s partnership with DMDII created Capability Modeling for Digital Factories (CaMDiF). CaMDiF seeks to allow for rapid deployment and customization of agile supply chains and visualization of manufacturing capabilities in virtual environments.

The project focuses on using ontologies to describe factories using a digital twin. The digital twin can be used to provide real-time, dynamic insight into technological capabilities and enable automated inference and reasoning about services. CaMDiF helps manufacturers build virtual supply chains that are used to simulate capabilities and benefits of modifying existing processes.

CaMDiF utilizes ontology files to describe machines in the virtual environment. The ontologies store machine specifications that can be imported easily into machine profiles on the OSCM cloud platform. The files can be used by OSCM to automatically provide default specifications for machines.

The development looks to allow manufacturers to be more precise and customers to have more details about the specifications of machines they want to commission.