Digital Twin development for the discrete event simulation of a ceramic system

The rapid evolution of customer's demand forces the industrial sector to find out new solutions for the optimization of the overall process. The improvement of technology allows to transform factories into smart factories, or cyber physical systems. This transformation is inside the concept of Industry 4.0. The Digital Twin is one of its key aspects, which is nowadays fundamental to achieve the market global leadership. This process underlines that the past approach of process definition and development is now too slow and too much flat in the results. The complexity problem leads to a non deterministic behaviour of the industrial process and logistic, and subsequently to a growing complexity of the dimensional evaluations, logic behaviours and machines design. So, the Digital Twin, has to mimic the evolution of data through the utilization of mathematical systems which precisely represent the industrial aspect considered. The goal of this thesis is to address the usage of this new item into the ceramic process development of the SACMI company. The Digital Twin will change completely the main internal phases: design, presale, sale, starting-up and functioning of the installation. During the design phase, the Digital Twin will help in refine the solutions of the industrial components developed. While for the presale it will lead to the minimization of the economic risks and to the preliminary analysis of the costs. Then, for the sale phase, it will allow the optimization of the layout and the advanced costs analysis. Those phases could be emphasized by the 3D visualization of the Digital Twin, which is nowadays more supportable by the graphic computational power. For what concern the starting-up of the factory it will optimize the set-up time of the process by the elaboration of feasible initial conditions with respect to the layout's types. Finally, for the functioning of the installation, it will optimize the efficiency through the definition of optimal conditions.