Knowledge Driven Approach to Auto-Generate Digital Twins for Industrial Plants

Control systems operate industrial plants to accomplish stakeholder objectives like achieving production targets, complying with environmental ordinances, handling faults, etc. Such stakeholder objectives get realised by identifying and executing valid control actions on the plant’s control system. E.g., to achieve fault management a command is fired to place machines in a fault mode when the plant is under an error state. Arriving at such control actions is a non-trivial task demanding a detailed understanding of the plant’s structure and behaviour. Besides, it is also essential to verify the consequences of such control actions relative to other cross-cutting objectives and plant behaviour. E.g., to fulfil fault management objectives, the action to set machines in fault mode may affect production goals due to the machine unavailability. Hence, validation of control actions is vital before executing them using the actual plant’s control system. With digital twin technologies (DT), it is now possible to verify the implications of such control actions against a plant’s behaviour and objectives in a simulated environment without affecting the actual plant operations. DTs get developed autonomously as one-off solutions to simulate and validate plant control actions in the current state of practice, demanding high efforts and domain expertise. Our paper proposes a knowledge-driven approach enabling automation in DT development. The result of our approach is an auto-generated digital twin that pro-actively mimics the plant’s control system behaviour and helps with the validation of control actions before their execution. We use this approach to build three fault management DTs in a power plant. The application of our approach significantly reduces the manual efforts and development time to build such DTs.