Online Credibility Assessment of Equipment Digital Twin for Discrete Manufacturing

The equipment digital twins (EDTs) for discrete manufacturing should be calibrated quickly to avoid irreversible physical damage to the equipment caused by biased control commands. Therefore, an online credibility assessment method for EDTs is urgently needed. However, existing assessment approaches consume too much time, and thus could not reveal dynamic faults in time. In this paper, the dynamic relationship between online evolution and actual applications of EDTs is investigated. Then, two steps are proposed to accelerate the assessment process significantly. One involves pre-constructing a performance-deviation-agent (PDA), and the other involves dynamically fitting the application-time-window (ATW) probability distribution. The methodology is applicable to discrete manufacturing processes. The dynamic credibility of EDT evolution process can be updated after every iteration of the model evolution. Sorting manufacturing equipment was used as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method. The time consumption was reduced by 90% compared with traditional assessment methods in the case.