Interactive Digital Twins for Online Planning and Worker Safety in Intralogistics and Production

Asset administration shells constitute a standardized, technical realization of digital twins and enable a unified description of important information within a production site for a safe, continuous and joint planning of intralogistics and manufacturing processes. In this paper, we show how an information and service infrastructure based on asset administration shells can be used to provide online-planners with unified, i.e. manufacturer-independent information facets of and respective control interfaces for involved assets, such as collaborative robots. To this end, we implemented a semi-virtualized production process using important industrial communication standards where the current state of real and simulated robots, as well as products, can be observed and manipulated at run-time and on site by means of an Augmented Reality-based user interface. In such dynamic scenarios, the worker safety needs to be maintained using the advances from the virtual representation of all assets. A technical demonstrator has been developed and discussed with domain experts to prove the underlying concept.