A Digital Twin Design for Conveyor Belts Predictive Maintenance

Artificial intelligence has been widely used to enable predictive maintenance. However, AI systems need a large amount of data to generate accurate results that can be used reliably in terms of data quality. One of the ways to obtain data from the system is through the development of a digital twin. Therefore, a digital twin design might be of key value for the predictive maintenance of systems enabling the simulation of the system’s performance, anticipating potential malfunctions, and consequently reducing the cost of unforeseen failures of the physical system. In this paper, we present a framework of a digital twin system for a conveyor belt along with different sensors that collect various types of data to be analyzed by a digital system. This way, the digital twin can generate more data focusing on reducing the time to obtain enough data to train the AI algorithm properly. Furthermore, the digital twin model is designed to develop the simulation environment and integrate it with the physical system.