Model-Driven Development of a Digital Twin for Injection Molding

Digital Twins (DTs) of Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) enable the smart automation of production processes, collection of data, and can thus reduce manual efforts for supervising and controlling CPPSs. Realizing DTs is challenging and requires significant efforts for their conception and integration with the represented CPPS. To mitigate this, we present an approach to systematically engineering DTs for injection molding that supports domain-specific customizations and automation of essential development activities based on a model-driven reference architecture. In this approach, reactive CPPS behavior is defined in terms of a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for specifying events that occur in the physical system. The reference architecture connects to the CPPS through a novel DSL for representing OPC-UA bindings. We have evaluated this approach with a DT of an injection molding machine that controls the machine to optimize the Design of Experiment (DoE) parameters between experiment cycles before the products are molded. Through this, our reference implementation of the DT facilitates the time-consuming setup of a DT and the subsequent injection molding activities. Overall, this facilitates to systematically engineer digital twins with reactive behavior that help to optimize machine use.