Digital twins have established themselves as a new digital key technology in the course of the last few years. In the context of virtual commissioning, digital twins reduce development and commissioning times for machines and systems or reduce machine and system downtimes during a system changeover by means of tests during development. The demand for digital twins as a sub-element of larger virtual machines and systems is also steadily increasing among component manufacturers. As digital component twins, they model the communication behaviour of the physical component with a controller and interact with other virtual elements within a simulation environment. In this presentation, the concrete implementation of a digital component twin and its integration into the ISG simulation environment ISG-virtuos in the course of an RFID identification task will be demonstrated. The modelled twin of a Balluff RFID reading head reads the data contained on an RFID tag and forwards the read data to a physical PLC via fieldbus communication. Furthermore, an MQTT interface implemented in the digital twin can be used to send read tag data to an edge gateway for further processing and analysis.
Speaker: Philippe Komma (Balluff GmbH), Dr.-Ing. Christian Scheifelfe (ISG Industrielle Steuerungstechnik GmbH)