No Arabic abstract
To demystify the Digital Twin concept, we built a simple yet representative thermal incubator system. The incubator is an insulated box fitted with a heatbed, and complete with a software system for communication, a controller, and simulation models. We developed two simulation models to predict the temperature inside the incubator, one with two free parameters and one with four free parameters. Our experiments showed that the latter model was better at predicting the thermal inertia of the heatbed itself, which makes it more appropriate for further development of the digital twin. The hardware and software used in this case study are available open source, providing an accessible platform for those who want to develop and verify their own techniques for digital twins.
In the way towards Industry 4.0, the complexity of the industrial systems increases due to the presence of multiple agents, Cyber-Physical Systems, distributed sensing, and big data introducing unknown dynamics that affect the production goals of the manufacturing processes. Thus, Digital Twin is a breaking technology corresponding to the capacity of developing a virtual representation of any complex system in order to perform design, analysis, and behavior prediction tasks that enhance the understanding of these systems through new enabling capabilities like real-time analytics, parallel sensing, or Smart Control Engineering. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed for the design and implementation of Digital Twin applications to the development of Smart Control Engineering. The steps of this framework involve system documentation, multidomain simulation, behavioral matching, and real-time monitoring. This framework is applied to develop the Digital Twin for a real-time vision feedback infrared temperature uniformity control. The obtained results show that Digital Twin is a fundamental part of the transformation into Industry 4.0.
Digital Twin is a breaking technology that allows creating virtual representations of complex physical systems based on updated information of the system and its physical laws. However, making the Digital Twin behavior matching with the real system can be challenging due to the number of unknown parameters in each twin. Its search can be done using optimization-based techniques, producing a family of models based on different system datasets, so, a discrimination criterion is required to determine the best Digital Twin model. This paper presents an information theory-based discrimination criterion to determine the best Digital Twin model resulting from a behavioral matching process. The information gain of a model is employed as a discrimination criterion. Box-Jenkins models are used to define the family of models for each behavioral matching result. The proposed method is compared with other information-based metrics as well as the $ u$gap metric. As a study case, the discrimination method is applied to the Digital Twin for a real-time vision feedback infrared temperature uniformity control system. Obtained results show that information-based methodologies are useful for selecting an accurate Digital Twin model representing the system among a family of plants
Digital Twin, as an emerging technology related to Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT), has attracted increasing attentions during the past decade. Conceptually, a Digital Twin is a digital replica of a physical entity in the real world, and this technology is leveraged in this study to design a cooperative driving system at non-signalized intersections, allowing connected vehicles to cooperate with each other to cross intersections without any full stops. Within the proposed Digital Twin framework, we developed an enhanced first-in-first-out (FIFO) slot reservation algorithm to schedule the sequence of crossing vehicles, a consensus motion control algorithm to calculate vehicles referenced longitudinal motion, and a model-based motion estimation algorithm to tackle communication delay and packet loss. Additionally, an augmented reality (AR) human-machine-interface (HMI) is designed to provide the guidance to drivers to cooperate with other connected vehicles. Agent-based modeling and simulation of the proposed system is conducted in Unity game engine based on a real-world map in San Francisco, and the human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation results prove the benefits of the proposed algorithms with 20% reduction in travel time and 23.7% reduction in energy consumption, respectively, when compared with traditional signalized intersections.
We present a data-driven optimization framework that aims to address online adaptation of the flight path shape for an airborne wind energy system (AWE) that follows a repetitive path to generate power. Specifically, Bayesian optimization, which is a data-driven algorithm for finding the optimum of an unknown objective function, is utilized to solve the waypoint adaptation. To form a computationally efficient optimization framework, we describe each figure-$8$ flight via a compact set of parameters, termed as basis parameters. We model the underlying objective function by a Gaussian Process (GP). Bayesian optimization utilizes the predictive uncertainty information from the GP to determine the best subsequent basis parameters. Once a path is generated using Bayesian optimization, a path following mechanism is used to track the generated figure-$8$ flight. The proposed framework is validated on a simplified $2$-dimensional model that mimics the key behaviors of a $3$-dimensional AWE system. We demonstrate the capability of the proposed framework in a simulation environment for a simplified $2$-dimensional AWE system model.
This paper presents a safe reinforcement learning system for automated driving that benefits from multimodal future trajectory predictions. We propose a safety system that consists of two safety components: a heuristic safety and a learning-based safety. The heuristic safety module is based on common driving rules. On the other hand, the learning-based safety module is a data-driven safety rule that learns safety patterns from driving data. Specifically, it utilizes mixture density recurrent neural networks (MD-RNN) for multimodal future trajectory predictions to accelerate the learning progress. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed safety system outperforms previously reported results in terms of average reward and number of collisions.