Synthetic data generation for digital twins: enabling production systems analysis in the absence of data

Journal article, 2024

Industry increasingly focuses on data-driven digital twins of production lines, especially for planning, controlling and optimising applications. However, the lack of open data on manufacturing systems presents a challenge to the development of new data-driven strategies. To fill this gap, the paper aim to introduce a strategy for generating random production lines and simulating their behaviour, thus enabling the generation of synthetic data. So far, such data can be recorded in event logs or machine status format, with the latter adopted for the use cases. To do so, the production lines are modelled using complex network concepts, with the system’s behaviour simulated via an algorithm in Python. Three use cases were assessed, in order to present possible applications. Firstly, the stabilisation of working, starved and blocked machines was investigated until a steady state was reached. The system behaviour was then investigated for different model parameters and simulation intervals. Finally, the production bottleneck behaviour (a phenomenon that can harm the production capacity of manufacturing systems) was statistically studied and described. The authors anticipate that this artificial and parametric data benchmark will enable the development of data-driven techniques without prior need for a real dataset.