Autonomous Digital Twins for Optimal Control of Discrete Event Systems
Andrea Matta
Politecnico di Milano
With the coming of the Industry 4.0 wave, digital representations of production systems have been promoted from marginal to central. Digital twins are not simply conceived as simulation models of their physical counterparts for offline what-if analysis, differently they are developed as self-adaptable and empowered decision-makers timely aligned with the dynamics of the real system. Enriched by these new features, digital twins are widely recognized as the key enablers for the implementation of optimal control of smart manufacturing systems. Despite this new role, there are significant barriers to the adoption of the digital twin concept in industrial applications. The creation and update of digital twin models is still a challenge because of the high skills required to use the simulation applications available in the market, the long development times, and their difficult integration with optimization and artificial intelligence packages. The frequent changes manufacturing systems encounter in their life cycle boost these issues making the system model and the control most rapidly obsolete. This talk describes data-driven approaches for generating and controlling multi-fidelity models for digital twins of manufacturing systems from data acquired from sensors also in non stationary situations. Application examples will also be presented.
Speaker bio: Andrea Matta is Full Professor of Manufacturing and Production Systems at Department of Mechanical Engineering of Politecnico di Milano. He graduated in Industrial Engineering at Politecnico di Milano where he develops his teaching and research activities since 1998. He was Distinguished Professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2014 to 2016 and Guest Professor between 2017-2019. He has been visiting scholar at Ecole Centrale Paris (France), University of California at Berkeley (USA), and Tongji University (China). He is member of the technical committee of MADE Competence Center. His research area includes analysis, design and management of manufacturing and health care systems. He has published 190 scientific papers on international and national journals/conference proceedings. He is Editor in Chief of Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal since 2017, past member of editorial board of OR Spectrum journal and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters journal. He is member of scientific committee in several international conferences. Member of the Steering Committee of PhD on Mechanical Engineering. Member of the ADA University Advisory Board. He was awarded with the Shanghai One Thousand Talent and Eastern Scholar in 2013.