2023 4Rev Awards Nomination – Innovation of the year – EVERYTHING CONNECTED

Innovation Name: The Digital Twine Reference Architecture for Industry 4.0

Innovation Website*: https://numorpho.org/2022/12/21/knitting-the-cybernetic-fabric/

What is the industry sector of the proposed technology?* Smart Manufacturing Process Automation

Materials (yes)
Energy Storage (no)
Energy Generation (no)
Chemicals (no)
Electronics (yes)

Describe the technology.*

“Digital drives Physical in cyber-physical systems”. Our Digital Twine reference architecture enables the synthetic blueprinting of use cases for advanced manufacturing initiatives by connecting the dots between disparate enterprise systems. It provides a coordinated basis for holistic understanding, collaboration, integration, optimization and harmonization of all activities to enable Industry 4.0 based formulations.

The Digital Twine integrates product data, enterprise resources, procurement & supply chain logistics, marketing operations and support & maintenance. It will provide for a cohesive dashboard comprising of integration protocols (API gateways, web-services, micro-services and service meshes), AI/ML driven inference engines and AR/VR based dynamic rendering and visualizations.

Give us your written elevator pitch:

Automation is hard. Imagining the future requires intense planning. In today’s world we need to link and intertwine multiple disparate systems and make them interoperable; aggregate data and provide pertinent and real time information at the right time and the right place with flexibility and ease of use.

Today, we stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. The response to it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is being driven by a staggering range of new technologies that are blurring the boundaries between people, the internet, and the physical world. It is the convergence of the digital, physical, and biological spheres.

Future-proofing designs for products and services for such endeavors entails creating dynamic blueprints that move beyond current 2D and simplistic 3D animations, to constructs that morph – dynamically change, evolve, and articulate with the conditions and the environment, and are embedded with intelligence that will learn, consider, and evolve.

Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO), is in the business of building an ecosystem to enable processes for such industrial applications. In our thesis for digital driving physical, the Digital Twine reference architecture will help aggregate people, process, and technology platforms to enable automation in Industry 4.0 today. It will also enable the correct management of cyber physical systems of the future for human-centric interactions of Industry and Services 5.0.

What problem does this innovation or process address?*

The Digital Twine reference architecture addresses the hard problem of automating systems – coordinating information and managing cyber-physical interactions that is the key to enabling Industry 4.0.

The Digital Twine is a combination of Digital Threads and Digital Twins spanning across different enterprise systems. It is utilized to compose and blueprint use cases in smart manufacturing initiatives ranging from:

brown-field initiatives – retrofitting existing systems,
green-field initiatives – defining infrastructure from ground up, to
blue-sky initiatives – creating disruptive technologies.

to enable make, manage, move, market, and maintain (M5) activities,

How did the idea originate?*

It is based on my engineering background in aerospace and automotive domains, and in strategic and IT consulting for fortune 500 companies. It combines my past experience in high-tech with recent advances in product ideation, additive manufacturing, Big Data and Cloud provisioning, IoT, AI/ML and AR/VR.

We have classified more than 20 use cases from our past and retrofitted using the Digital Twine reference architecture to blueprint the interactions. Our conclusion is that it reduces planning time by a magnitude, improves holistic understanding and enables complete collaboration between different teams.

How is this innovation unique?*

Building smart and connected products and services today and in the future requires coordination of teams that are geographically dispersed, utilization of different tools, and coordination with 3rd party services. The Digital Twine helps connect multiple systems together for a holistic end-to-end view so that people, processes and platforms can harmoniously work together.

Rather than looking at a singular digital twin that virtualizes a single process, product functionality or a technology, the Digital Twine is an aggregation of digital threads (the data, its legacy and its appropriate pull-push), and digital twins (multiple different virtual compositions, that can be concerted together).

At Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO), our basis is to understand cause and effect by assimilating digital twins and their associated digital threads to automate, harmonize, and optimize operations to enable robust digital strategies and appropriate actionable outcomes.

The Digital Twine will manifest as product, process, and production entities. These will be driven by Nvidia’s Omniverse platform utilizing its physics and data driven basis, and our own physmatics based simulation environment. It will utilize tools from our partner companies – Hexagon Nexus, Ansys, PTC Thingworx and NTopology to cater to innovation, additive and smart manufacturing, and logistics-based scenarios. The rendering will also utilize Unity and the Unreal Engine for depiction of virtual and augmented reality world scenes to depict engineering simulations, shop floor locations, geographical movements, and HMI interfaces. Built up spaces will be pre-generated using the Matterport engine and be superimposed with virtual data.How does this innovation or process improve the client or manufacturer’s profitability, brand reputation, employee morale, etc.?*

Typical industrial operations can be classified as brownfield, greenfield or blue sky (descriptions in prior section) or a combination of the three. What we are doing is similar to converting from brick and mortar to online that utilized digital transformations by coordinating all activities so that the solutions are innovative, automated and customer centric to enable smart manufacturing.

We plan to revolutionize the transformation to Industry 4.0 and beyond by using digital to drive physical processes to enable complete automation and end-to-end synchronization of the synthetic fabric of industrial processes.

How does this innovation benefit the greater good?*

Coordinated, Less waste, Faster, Cheaper, Better and Future focused. Eliminate bottle necks, reliance on off-shore, localization of talent.

Please consider its effects on society, the environment, culture, the economy, etc.

We are working on several initiatives in the public sector to enable green, circular economy, exploit adjacencies,

What is the status of the technology development?*

The Digital Twine reference architecture has been validate by testing against more than 20 use cases that fall into the following three categories:

1. Proto Factory – enabling the coordination of innovation, design and intention for manufacturing.

2. Operational Digital Twin – enabling smart manufacturing using Edge services, IoT, Digital Threads and Digital twins to harmonize and optimize industrial operations and automating them.

3. Omnichannel Marketplace – enabling coordination between customers and providers to create a connected commerce platfom for cloud-based contract manufacturing.

We are in the process of implementing it for a remote manufacturing concept for the Department of Defense and proposing it as a green infrastructure solution for Chicago’s Climate Energy program.

Please provide any supporting visual materials.

NUMO_Cybernetic_Process_Framework_anim