Conceiving a Digital Twin for a Flexible Manufacturing System

Digitization and virtualization represent key factors in the era of Industry 4.0. Digital twins (DT) can certainly contribute to increasing efficiency various productive sectors as they monitoring, managing, improvement a product or process throughout its life cycle. Although several works deal with DTs, there are gaps regarding use this technology when Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is used. Existing work, for most part, concerned simulating progress manufacturing without providing production data real-time. Still, solutions presented literature relatively expensive may be difficult implement companies, due their complexity. In digital twin an FMS conceived. The specific module ERP (Enterprise Resources Planning) system used digitize physical entity. Production entered according tryouts performed FMS. Sensors installed main components FMS, CNC (computer numerical control) lathe, robotic arm, pallet conveyor send information real-time results show that simulations using present very satisfactory compared time, such rate, queue management, feedstock, equipment, status easily accessed by operators managers at any time during process, confirming MES (manufacture execution system) efficiency. low-cost hardware software work showed feasibility. DT created represents initial step towards designing metaverse solution unit question, which should operate near future smart autonomous factory model.