Towards a Human-Centric Digital Twin: An AutomationML-Based Description to Include Human Factors in Machine Design

The term Human-Centric Digital Twin (HCDT) has been recently coined mean-ing the design and the simulation of complex production systems by integrating human factors. This paper presents an HCDT system architecture focused on an enhanced 3D virtual model, embedding human interaction information in product and process information. Such a model extends the current features of Automa-tionML (AML) framework, a recently defined standard for digitization in Indus-try 4.0, by specific human-related data. The framework has been primarily inte-grated into a Virtual Reality (VR) scenario to support, predict and study the hu-man-system interactions in the early stages of industrial machine design. The in-frastructure has been validated on a real case developed in collaboration with an Italian manufacturing company, world leader in automatic machine design and production. User testing was conducted within a virtual environment, where the HCDT enriched the 3D virtual model of the machine with an additional AML de-scription of human-system interaction.