Design and development of a Digital Twin for a production line: a case study from the winter-sport sector

The increasing complexity of products and manufacturing processes, combined with the increasingly advanced technological integration of the manufacturing sector, raised new challenges for world-class industries to optimize time-to-market, resources and cost. Simulation, as a key Industry 4.0 enabling technology, allows to emulate the steps of a manufacturing process, thereby achieving significant improvements in all the phases of the product and process development. A simulation model supports the design and sizing of the production plant, in order to ensure the correct functionality of a line, checking for any criticalities before its inclusion in a process; the improvement of existing processes, identifying problems that may induce bottlenecks; the verification of cycle times; the optimization of production KPIs, the testing different scenarios and the effective planning and scheduling of daily production. A simulation process can be implemented and improved by creating the Digital Twin of the industrial system, which can be realized on a single line scale or extended to the whole factory. Its intention is to replicate every function and operation of interest within the company. Furthermore, through the integration with the management and control systems (MES, ERP, WMS), it is possible to connect the virtual model to the physical environment to obtain real-time data exchange. This paper follows this outline and shows the design and development of the digital twin of a production line for hockey balls present in the Smart Factory of Ostschweizer Fachhochschule. The entire production process is reproduced using Siemens Technomatix software, while Siemens MindSphere software is used for the data connection feeding the Digital Twin with data from the physical operative environment.