Toward Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems: Digital Twin Meets Artificial Intelligence

TLDR

Industry 4.0 seeks smarter, autonomous processes that improve agility, cost efficiency, and user experience, requiring effective data processing that AI can provide. The article reviews the digital twin as a cyber‑physical system in Industry 4.0, illustrating AI’s role within this concept. It details how edge, fog, and 5G technologies enable digital twins and analyzes AI agents’ roles at application and infrastructure levels across these domains. Experimental validation on robotic‑arm data demonstrates that movement prediction via the digital twin effectively showcases its potential.

Abstract

Industry 4.0 aims to support smarter and autonomous processes while improving agility, cost efficiency, and user experience. To fulfill its promises, properly processing the data of the industrial processes and infrastructures is required. Artificial intelligence (AI) appears as a strong candidate to handle all generated data, and to help in the automation and smartification process. This article overviews the digital twin as a true embodiment of a cyber-physical system (CPS) in Industry 4.0, showing the mission of AI in this concept. It presents the key enabling technologies of the digital twin such as edge, fog, and 5G, where the physical processes are integrated with the computing and network domains. The role of AI in each technology domain is identified by analyzing a set of AI agents at the application and infrastructure levels. Finally, movement prediction is selected and experimentally validated using real data generated by a digital twin for robotic arms with results showcasing its potential.