Architecture Blueprint Enabling Distributed Digital Twins

Mass production today is optimized for large lot sizes, and changes to industrial production lines are effort-intense, time-consuming, and costly. The fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 (I4.0), aims at reducing the effort needed for changes in industrial production lines. The key benefits of next-generation manufacturing systems are less downtimes and the production of small lot sizes down to lot size 1. I4.0 does not introduce a silver bullet technology, but requires a transformation of the system architecture of production systems. In the literature, however, there systematic guidance for designing manufacturing systems that address central I4.0 use cases like plug'n'produce and end-to-end communication is still missing, as are details on the infrastructure needed to enable I4.0 technologies such as Digital Twins. To contribute to filling this gap, this paper presents (i) a Digital Twin architecture blueprint driven by central I4.0 use cases and (ii) a prototypical open-source implementation of the architecture using the concept of the Asset Administration Shell.