Decision Support on the Shop Floor Using Digital Twins

Increased flexibility and improved resilience in production and manufacturing processes are goals that are becoming more and more important in the context of Industry 4.0 and from the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, efficient operation of production must be guaranteed to achieve economic as well as ecological objectives. Intelligent assistance systems follow the idea to support stakeholders of production systems in their decisions and can thus be useful applications for helping to master the various challenges and to meet these goals. In this paper, we describe functional components of these decision support systems: data provision and data extraction, knowledge base, simulation models, model execution and analytics, and application and user interaction. We show the underlying technologies and illustrate why these assistant systems are valuable for several stakeholders.