Evaluation of Industry 4.0 Data Formats for Digital Twin of Optical Components

A wide range of software and hardware components are present in today’s production systems and plants using a variety of interfaces and data formats for information exchange on different levels of the system. To increase the traceability, the lifecycle management and providing a single point of source of component-specific data, the Digital Twin technology is proposed, linking different data sets tailored to the requirements of different kind of users (e.g., machines, technicians, logistics, manufacturing execution systems). The data exchange between entities in the manufacturing network relies on machine-readable, flexible and self-describing data formats. When implementing or integrating different components into complex systems, the interoperability challenge is a major concern to address by the system designers and becomes a central task for the creation and integration of Digital Twin technology. In this paper, we evaluate different formats that are used in real environments and create a requirements framework for an ideal format for exchanging flexible and self-describing data in context of optical components manufacturing process and their special requirements.