Research on digital twin framework for customized product manual assembly systems

With the increasing demand for personalized products, customization has become increasingly popular. To achieve customization and efficiency, products are always the same as those in batch production in the former stages but different in the assembly stage. Consequently, assembly is the key stage in customized production, and manual operations are necessary. Compared with automated operations, manual operations still have problems such as easy misassembly and low efficiency. The digital twin (DT) technology has the potential to monitor and solve these problems. This study proposes a framework for production line reconstruction and intelligent monitoring of customized product manual assembly based on DT. To meet the requirements of DT modeling for customized product manual assembly systems, a progressive multidimensional DT modelling method is proposed. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed modelling method and framework is verified through a case study of a customized control valve assembly system in an instrument manufacturing enterprise.