A Digital Twin Based Design of the Semi-physical Marine Engine Room Simulator for Remote Maintenance Assistance

Abstract

The semi-physical marine engine room simulator is one of the necessary equipment for the training of marine engineers worldwide. However, its maintenance has become a problem for a long time due to its complexity and vulnerability. Although the semi-physical marine engine room simulator fails frequently, its failures are usually small-scale communication failures, which are easy to solve for experts. For such kind of micro faults, the cost of field maintenance by experts is very high due to the long journey. Generally, most manufactures will choose to assist the users’ maintenance by telephone or email firstly. If it does not work, they will have to send experts for field maintenance which is expensive for users. In this paper, we propose a digital twin architecture of the semi-physical marine engine room simulator to assist users in remote maintenance. The digital twin system is a multi-twins architecture consisting of the user digital twin and the manufacturer digital twin. The user digital twin is a technical guidance platform for information reception and display, through which the user can get technical adviser from the experts in the 3D virtual environment. The manufacture digital twin is a platform for monitoring and troubleshooting by experts. The communication faults are the main faults of the semi-physical marine engine room simulator, which are easy to monitor. Consequently, it is possible to realize remote maintenance assistance through the digital twin system without a lot of time cost and economic cost.