AR Setup for Digital Twin Remote Support
The concept of Digital Twins (DT) in manufacturing has over the years developed to improve processes, such as maintenance, machine monitoring, and equipment optimisation on the shop floor.
A DT can be interpreted as the virtual replication of real-world physical existences, in which the DT provides guidelines and live evidence of these entities’ status and future projections that can support humans in performing manufacturing tasks and assists him/her in the decision-making process. Notwithstanding the human expertise being crucial in manufacturing applications, the information flow is currently still only one-way: from the DT to the human. As such, the operator’s feedback and observations are not utilised within industrial DTs In DigiTOP we believe that considering human perceptual feedback in a manufacturing DT human sensor feedback in an industrial DT context combined with remote expert support can enhance manufacturing activities such as maintenance.

Figure 1: Flow chart of set-up for digital twin remote support
Detailed description of Figure 1:
Figure 1 shows a flow chart of the communication layer with bidirectional flows between the Digital Twin Layer ( shown above in the diagram ) and the Physical Layer ( shown beneath in the diagram ).
There is a bidirectional flow between the Digital Twin Layer and the Communication Layer and the “Remote Expert” depicated as a person sitting at a terminal.
Reference
Al-Yacoub, A, Eaton, W, Zimmer, M, Buerkle, A, Ariansyah, D, Erkoyuncu, JA, Lohse, N (2020) (Accepted for presentation) Investigating the Impact of Human in-the-Loop Digital Twin in an Industrial Maintenance Context. In the 9th International Conference on Through-life Engineering Service, Cranfield UK, 3-4 November.