Abstract:

The health situation that humanity has suffered in recent times has forced a rapid transition from face-to-face teaching-learning to an online format in the universities around the world. This situation, coupled with the fact that hands-on experiences are central to the learning process in all fields of engineering [1], has led to significant advances in technological resources that connect theoretical and practical concepts in a simple and engaging way.

In this context, the development of digital twins (DTs) is a practice that has gained increasing interest. The term DT is commonly used in industry to refer to a high-fidelity virtual representation of a physical product or process to understand, simulate, predict and optimize that reality [2, 3, 4]. When it comes to automation education, DTs can be seen as live virtual representations of devices and processes that make up factories, which are connected to the real system they represent through cyber-physical systems, providing live information from the plants. This results in highly accurate models whose behavior closely resembles that of the real systems they represent. In this way, systems can be tested in virtual simulations and possible failures can be identified, thus preventing them from occurring in reality; or the necessary maintenance operations can be carried out prior to failure in order to reduce the costs derived from these problems that may occur in the different installations or processes.

This work arose from the idea of developing DTs of automated systems that would serve as support in courses of industrial automation in engineering degrees. Among the options available, we decided to use Virtual Universe Pro software to perform the first steps to create DTs, namely, a digital representation of existing or planned industrial installations, with no automated data exchange between the physical-digital objects.

Virtual Universe Pro is a software for simulation of automation elements that enables to observe, simulate and interact with control systems [4]. It can be connected to different types of programmable logic controllers (PLCs), so widely used in numerous applications in the current industry (Industry 4.0), making it a very interesting tool for understanding and learning how PLCs work and facilitating the application of the knowledge acquired in the classroom to real environments in a very dynamic and visual way.

In addition to an introduction to the use of Virtual Universe Pro in the academic context, we also present different case studies that have been developed to be used in the laboratory of automation courses.

References:
[1] S. Dormido, “Control Learning: Present and Future,” Annual Reviews in Control, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 115–136, 2004.
[2] A. Liljaniemi, H. Paavilainen, “Using Digital Twin Technology in Engineering Education. Course Concept to Explore Benefits and Barriers,” Open Engineering, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 377–385, 2020.
[3] M. Singh, E. Fuenmayor, E. P. Hinchy, Y. Qiao, N. Murray, D. Devine, “Digital Twin: Origin to Future,” Applied System Innovation, vol. 4, no. 2: 36, 2021.
[4] Irai, User Manual of Virtual Universe Pro. Accessed 16 November, 2022. Retrieved from http://www.irai.com/vup/v3/vup3en.pdf.

Keywords:

Digital twin, simulation, Virtual Universe Pro, automation, engineering.