Construction Principle for Object-Oriented Digital Twins of Mechatronic Complexes of Rolling Mills

The development and deployment of rolling mill digital twins (DTs) are highly demanded by metal companies. Research in this area is conducted by leading rolling equipment developers. However, the analysis of the situation at metal plants shows that the practical usage of DTs lags significantly behind the theoretical developments. This is because there are no available DT development methods and their deployment experience. This paper reviews the experience of DT application in the virtual commissioning of a Reversing Cold Mill. The authors review the concept of constructing an aggregated digital twin based on object-oriented prototype twins and interconnected mechatronic system instance twins. The article contains a description of the mill and the key mechatronic system DT modules. The authors provide a rationale for their location within the industrial logic controller structures. The article contains some oscillograms obtained using the digital model and the actual mill and confirm the correlations between them. The advantages of the approach suggested include the simplicity attributed to the DT development based on the public-domain software without the use of digital platforms. Some recommendations are given for the large-scale application of the suggested DT construction principle at rolling production equipment.