Enabling IT/OT Integration using Digital Twins of Business Processes

Hannes Waclawek, Salzburg University with Kempten University

A​bstract:

The Salzburg University of Applied Sciences together with the Kempten University of Applied Sciencesruns a geographically distributed testbed for use in agent-based AI research and education. It consists ofa range of components of different manufacturers and platforms constituting a game-based industrial production setting centered around the pick-and-place use case of playing the game of Nine Men's Morris.Humans or AI agents can place production orders in the form of game moves which are then turned into gameboard states at two geographically distributed robot cells: One located in Salzburg and one located in Kempten.The use of different kinds of robots, PLCs, HMIs along with modern AI methods and communication betweengeographically distributed facilities brings along with it the need for an approach to seamlessly integrate IT and OT equipment. In this talk, we identify core principles that are suitable for solving this problem andargue how these principles can be used to develop the concept of Industrial Business Process Twins (IBPT).We then evaluate the result with respect to the different views of the RAMI 4.0 model and take a look at possible future additions.