Cyber twins supporting industry 4.0 application development

Industry 4.0 involves enhancing industrial processes with high-fidelity and high-value information from machines, workers, and products. Industry 4.0 applications improve production efficiency, product quality, etc., by using Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Existing industry 4.0 application development approaches are centered on commercial IoT platforms that provide siloed development and runtime environments (leading to vendor lockdown) and only support individual sensors and actuators instead of entire machines. Therefore, Industry 4.0 applications need to construct representations of complex machines from such basic elements, which is a costly, error-prone, inefficient hindering portability across machines and plants. This paper proposes Cyber Twins, a comprehensive solution for efficient Industry 4.0 application development, testing, and portability. The Cyber Twins solution includes a model for machine representation and services that facilitate Industry 4.0 application development. Finally, a prototype Cyber Twin implementation is presented, with its functionality described using a sample Industry 4.0 application.