A Digital Twin Driven Human-Centric Ecosystem for Industry 5.0

Industry 5.0 embodies the vision for the future of factories, emphasizing the importance of sustainable industrialization and the role of industry in society, through the key concept of placing the well-being of workers at the center of the production process. Building upon this vision, we propose a new paradigm to design human-centric industrial applications. To this end, we exploit Digital Twin (DT) technology to build a digital replica for each entity on the shop floor and support and augment interaction among workers and machines. While so far DTs in automation have been proposed for machine digitalization, the core element of the proposed approach is the Operator Digital Twin (ODT). In this scenario, biometrics allows to build a reliable model of those operator’s characteristics that are relevant in working contexts. Biometric traits are measured and processed to detect physical, emotional, and mental conditions, which are used to define the operator’s state. Perspectively, this allows to manage and monitor production and processes in an operator-in-the-loop manner, where not only is the operator aware of the state of the plant, but also any technological agent in the plant acts and reacts according to the operator’s needs and conditions. In this paper, we define the modeling of the envisioned ecosystem, present the designed DT’s blue-print architecture, discuss its implementation in relevant application scenarios, and report an example of implementation in a collaborative robotics scenario. Note to Practitioners—This paper was motivated by the problem of designing human-cyber-physical systems, where production processes are managed by concurrently taking into account operators, machines and plant status. This answers the needs of the novel Industry 5.0 paradigm, which aims to enhance social sustainability of modern factories. To this end, we propose an architecture based on digital twins that allows to develop a digital layer, detached from the physical one, where the plant can be monitored and managed. This allows the creation of a digital ecosystem where machines, operators, and the interactions among them are represented, augmented, and managed. We discuss how the proposed architecture can be applied to three relevant scenarios: remote training and maintenance, line operation and line supervision. Moreover, the implementation in a collaborative robotics scenario is presented, to provide an example of the proposed architecture can be implemented in industrial scenarios.