The application of Digital Twins in education is emerging and evolving, bringing numerous advantages both in terms of education and as an aid in cost containment. The fields of application are various and range from industrial system simulations to architecture, from engineering to surgical medicine, and many more.
Didactics developed with Digital Twin applications provide students with an infinite number of application examples to work with, characterized by the possibility of replications of structures and systems that they could not test in the real world. Last but not least, this technology prevents the risk of making even serious mistakes, that are usual in a training course, without causing irreparable damage to physical structures. From the training point of view, the advantages are considerable, such as the possibility of ranging over different didactic solutions without the necessity to occupy physical space and avoiding huge investments in purchasing new technologies that moreover suffer from very rapid obsolescence.
While experimentation on physical systems remains fundamental, it is easy to understand how the use of Digital Twins can give a strong acceleration in training activities, with a relative increase in their quality.
As part of the training courses on industrial automation issues, which are specific to the Digital Twin on Smart Manufacturing project, various systems are used for the creation of digital twins in machinery and production processes. These implementations range from simpler solutions with provided case studies or easy exercises to more complex systems, where it is necessary to construct from scratch their own designs using Cad systems interfaced with programmable controllers. In each case, the complexity lies in being able to correctly simulate the system’s response according to what might happen in a physical system.
For example, several schools and vocational training organisations are adopting the Factory IO system (factoryio.com), a system mainly dedicated to the training on PLC system programming which, through very realistic graphics and usage similar to videogames, allows programming exercises to be carried out on different levels of difficulty, and using different PLC brands. The teacher can also decide to adopt either the solutions already proposed by the developers or to create customised solutions, with the limit of using just the devices available in the programme.
The operation of this system is very simple: after choosing the case study of interest, all that is needed is to configure the type of PLC to use and to match the tags of each device available. Starting from the list of input and output tags, the students can create their own code and, via an Ethernet connection between the physical PLC and the Factory IO platform, proceed to test their work. Very accurate is the management of any malfunctions, the consequences of which are correctly displayed on the simulator, which allows for very realistic feedback.
