Digitalisation of manufacturing is a crucial component of the Industry 4.0 transformation. The digital twin is an important tool for enabling real-time digital access to precise information about physical systems and for supporting process optimisation via the translation of the associated big data into actionable insights. Although a variety of frameworks and conceptual models addressing the requirements and advantages of digital twins has been suggested in the academic literature, their implementation has received less attention. The work presented in this paper aims to make a proposition that considers the novel challenges introduced for data analysis in the presence of heterogeneous and dynamic cyber-physical systems in Industry 4.0. The proposed approach defines a digital twin simulation tool that captures the dynamics of a machining vibration signal from a source model and adapts them to a given target environment. This constitutes a flexible approach to knowledge extraction from the existing manufacturing simulation models, as information from both physics-based and data-driven solutions can be elicited this way. Therefore, an opportunity to reuse the costly established systems is made available to the manufacturing businesses, and the paper presents a process optimisation framework for such use case. The proposed approach is implemented as a domain adaptation algorithm based on the generative adversarial network model. The novel CycleStyleGAN architecture extends the CycleGAN model with a style-based signal encoding. The implemented model is validated in an experimental scenario that aims to replicate a real-world manufacturing knowledge transfer problem. The experiment shows that the transferred information enables the reduction of the required target domain data by one order of magnitude.
Socializing the knowledge transfer problem