Digital Twin for collaborative spaces and Web Applications development in the context of Industry 4.0

The "Fourth Industrial Revolution", an important milestone in the technological evolution has combined advanced manufacturing techniques with the IoT, in order to be able to use analyses and information to take important decisions in the digital manufacturing environment and basically forcing companies to rethink about their organization. This trend relies on the employment of important technologies like Cloud computing, IoT (Internet of Things), Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the aim of creating the so-called smart factories. They are called smart because with these technologies, products and tools in the production process get networked enabling in this way communication, sharing of relevant data, new ways of production and real-time optimization. In a scenario where the cooperation among the different components of a company communicate with each other sharing data, a technology which is gaining more and more importance is: Digital Twin The Digital Twin, one of the most promising technologies for smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0, consists in creating a virtual representation of a physical resource like a production process, a product or a robot by means of the data collected about it, with the purpose of recreating all the functionalities, interaction and communication interfaces for optimization, diagnosis, validation and prediction purposes. In this thesis work, solutions to specific problems related to the presented technological scope have been proposed, in the context of two different projects: ICOSAF and DiPreTreat. The aim of ICOSAF is the operator enhancement, in order to exploit the workers intelligence and flexibility in tasks where the human factor is more important, cobots are used in collaborative spaces for low added value tasks. More specifically the activity performed is about representing a specific process and the cobots involved, by means of the Digital Twins, to simulate, predict, optimize and eventually to integrate the developed system with a dedicated Human Machine Interface which is used instead for reflecting its status, for controlling it and for visualizing meaningful insight obtained with the collected data. Its definition in cooperative systems is fundamental to obtain advanced functionalities in terms of monitoring, control and management of the activities. The aim in DiPreTreat instead, consists in building a functional and robust software platform able to address a problem that afflicts concrete buildings: the corrosion of reinforcing steel. Indeed, thanks to implementation of a dedicated software application, specific functionalities have been provided such as the possibility of accessing the information gathered from the sensors installed in the different facilities, the possibility of producing a data presentation able to give a timely insight on the problem and furthermore the possibility to process those data with AI-based algorithms aiming in supporting predictive maintenance and forecast of corrosion issues. Thanks to the spread of internet almost all the users have already familiarized with web applications. A Single Page Application has been realized which allows the view of long-term measurements on the concrete deterioration parameters. The implemented solution is only a link in the chain of components of a wide infrastructure, by means of which the final user can monitor the status of the different facilities and eventually take important decisions to solve the problem.