Digital Pyramid: an approach to relate industrial automation and digital twin concepts

Abstract

The so-called fourth industrial revolution has brought different technologies to aid in the launching of new products, automation of manufacturing process and designing of intelligent manufacturing systems to monitor and control activities inside the factories. One recurrent challenge of the industrial sector is to evaluate multiple scenarios to make decisions at different levels of the business model. Innovative technologies and tools are used to provide solutions to existing gaps in current manufacturing systems. The evaluation of scenarios is used to manage risks, costs, prepare for upcoming work and forecast demand. Thus, the use of Digital Twin (DT) has proven its value covering the simulation and creation of virtual environments without the physical investment needed. With emergent technologies comes to a great responsibility for institutes to prepare undergraduate students in the development of novel skills, thus, technologies should be adapted and included into the teaching-learning process to aid the adoption from educational to the industrial sector. In this work, it is shown how the adoption of DT has been used to teach industrial concepts such as the automation pyramid, the programming of programmable logic controllers PLC and the exchange of information through industrial networks along with the concepts that constitute digital twins, such as digital master, digital shadow and modelling through system dynamics. Besides, the general vision of how digitalization is understood aligned to the vision of education 4.0 and applied to teach a tool to reduce the time for decision making into the industrial sector.