Constructing Digital Twins for IEC61499 Based Distributed Control Systems

Digital twins present revolutionary potential in smart manufacturing and production. However, their application to distributed control systems is limited in literature. This leaves automation engineers wishing to apply the concept at a loss, as they must construct a digital twin from a conceptual level with little to no guidelines. To help the adoption of the digital twin concept, a general architecture that may be tuned to the needs of the physical application is required.Within this paper, we propose an architecture for digital twins in IEC61499 based distributed control systems. Using this architecture, we construct the model based on known physics and sensor data to be used in the digital twin for simulation purposes. This demonstrates itself as an effective method for constructing the model of a digital twin for the purposes of dynamic simulation and control. With this base architecture in place, we may now work towards expanding the capability of the set-up to that of a full digital twin.