Investigating the Impact of Human in-the-Loop Digital Twin in an Industrial Maintenance Context

Abstract

In the manufacturing context, the concept of Digital Twins (DT) has over the years emerged to improve manufacturing processes, such as assembly, maintenance, machine monitoring, and optimisation for all physical equipment on the shop floor. A DT can be understood as the virtual representation of a real-world physical entity that provides guidelines and live indication of the entity status and future projections that can assist humans in numerous manufacturing applications. Despite the human expertise being crucial in manufacturing applications, according to literature, the information flow is currently still only one-way: from the DT to the human. As such, the operator’s feedback and observations are not utilised within industrial DTs. The presented paper hypothesises that a Virtual Reality Digital Twin framework that includes human sensor feedback in an industrial DT context combined with remote expert support can impact the industrial maintenance cost.