An Open Simulator framework for 3D Visualization of Digital Twins

Abstract

Production Digital Twins (DTs) mirror and interact with the production lines that they model through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) based bidirectional data flow pipelines. There is a need for interactive 3D visualization of DTs to unlock the promised capabilities for real time monitoring, optimization, reconfiguration, maintenance and control of the production process. DTs based on open source frameworks like SimPy lack an interactive 3D visualization frontend. This paper proposes a generic open source framework for the 3D visualization of any Discrete Event Simulation (DES) based production DT. As an example, an interactive 3D visualization of a SimPy based DT of a real Surface Mount Technology (SMT) Printed Circuit Board (PCB) line is presented. We visualize machine states, process flow, energy and throughput metrics of the DT and the real line in 3D. We believe that the proposed 3D visualization framework can help ease model validation efforts and can enable interactive “what if” analysis and control for optimization of the production process.