Designing a Process-oriented Digital Twin for Industrial Testing Laboratories

Title data

Weidlich, Robin ; Albrecht, Tobias ; Derr, Patrick ; Röglinger, Maximilian:
Designing a Process-oriented Digital Twin for Industrial Testing Laboratories.
In: IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. Vol. 71 (2024) . - pp. 15174-15187.
ISSN 0018-9391
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2024.3481670

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Abstract in another language

Digital twins have gained significant attention in recent years as a means to represent physical objects digitally. It is now applied for planning, monitoring, and decision-making across various domains. While extensively leveraged in manufacturing, digital twins also present promising opportunities in other process-intensive sectors, such as the testing, inspection, and calibration industry. Industrial testing laboratories face challenges like cost pressures and efficiency demands, operating within a complex socio-technical and highly regulated environment. Current digital solutions, such as Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS), fall short of providing a comprehensive data and process management perspective and do not fully comply with the ISO/IEC 17025 standard, which ensures trust in laboratory operations and results. This paper aims to address these gaps by proposing a set of design principles (DPs) and a software architecture (SA) for a process-oriented digital lab twin developed through a design science research (DSR) approach. The artifact is evaluated through expert interviews, a prototypical implementation, and a field study in an industrial laboratory setting. The findings offer valuable insights for designing digital twins in laboratory process management, guiding future research and practical applications.