An effective MBSE approach for constructing industrial robot digital twin system

Recently, the rapid development of digital twin (DT) technology has been regarded significant in Cyber-physical systems (CPS) promotion. Scholars are focusing on the theoretical architecture and implementing applications, in order to establish a high-fidelity, dynamic, and full-lifecycle DT model and achieve a deep fusion of real and virtual. As a typical complex system with multi-disciplines, multi-physics, and multi-domain characteristics, industrial robot (IR) involves various processes and elements from the two other levels of the system: components and production lines. Their complex relationships lead to a huge challenge to build a comprehensive DT model. Current researchers usually concentrates on single-layer services because of limited construction methodology, which results in enormous isolated models, and leads to low reusable system blocks, finite scalability, and high costs of design, adjustment, upgrade, and maintenance. To address these issues, a standardized methodology and a hierarchical, modular, and generic architecture are proposed to depict comprehensive and variable industrial robot digital twin (IRDT). Firstly, the ontology information model is presented by analyzing variable factors systematically. Then, model-based system engineering (MBSE) based methodology is introduced, including construction process and variants management. After modeling process of three levels (problem domain, solution main, and implementation domain) and four viewpoints (requirement, structure, behavior, and parameter), a generic architecture of IRDT is constructed and a feature-based variants management method is described. Besides, a six-axis IRDTS is implemented to illustrate the mapping of logical architecture and physical system as a multi-level elements and processes representation example. And the steps of numerical evaluations consist of system delay and derivation. Finally, results show the effectiveness and the potential of the proposed theoretical methodology for constructing IRDTS and other industrial applications. •An architecture of IRDT are established for fusing processes and elements.•A methodology based on MBSE is proposed for constructing IRDTS effectively.•DT model and DT system are integrated for multi-level simulation and monitoring.