A Distributed Digital Twin Architecture for Shop Floor Monitoring Based on Edge-Cloud Collaboration

Throughout recent years, many “Smart Factory” concepts have been emerged to escort the current technological progress. Among these concepts, we found the Digital Twin which is a burgeoning technology that attracts great interests from academics and industry. Akin to other technologies, the power of Digital Twin can be strengthened by leveraging other technologies' benefits such as those of cloud computing and edge computing. First, to support the implementation of the Digital Twin for the shop floor monitoring, a conceptual architecture of the Digital Twin based on edge-cloud collaboration is proposed. This architecture is believed to enhance the real-time capabilities of the Digital Twin while dealing with the abundant amounts of manufacturing data. Moreover, the paper discusses how the microservices architecture can benefit the proposed Digital Twin architecture. On the other hand, in order to provide an underpinning to researchers on the Digital Twin topic, the paper sums up the description and an up-to-date output of the Digital Twin, highlighting four manufacturing application scenarios.