Efficient management of digital twins in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing industry (TWIN2WORK)

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for 45% of employees in the European manufacturing industry. Industry 4.0 represents high innovation pressure for all SME business processes. SMEs must be able to meet the digital challenges with limited resources. One solution is the system-independent digital twin of Industry 4.0 ("AAS"), which provides new cross-company interfaces in the form of AAS sub-models. Four target scenarios are being considered as part of the TWIN2WORK research project: I. distributed engineering and simulation, II. flexible manufacturing, III. predictive maintenance and IV. continuous quality improvement. For these target scenarios, the existing AAS submodels are linked to form an overall process. This should enable SMEs to participate in Industry 4.0 supply chains with minimal implementation effort. The process model is described in such a way that it can be easily adapted and expanded for the respective SME.