Development of an education program for digital manufacturing system engineers based on ‘Digital Triplet’ concept

In the Industry 4.0 era, cyber physical manufacturing systems (CPPS) has started to change activities of manufacturing system engineers into CPS based ones. In typical Japanese factories, manufacturing system engineers are always stationed at the shop floor and continuously improve manufacturing systems with workers. For supporting such engineers’ activities, we are developing the concept of ‘Digital Triplet’ as an extension of Digital Twin. Digital Triplet consists of intelligent activity world in addition to the cyber world and the physical world and supports manufacturing system engineers in developing engineering processes with the cyber and physical worlds. Based on this, we are developing an education program. In this paper, we first describe the concept of Digital Triplet. Next, after explaining the overview of the education program, we introduce a course in which trainees (mainly novice engineers) execute ‘Kaizen’ with a prototype CPS system of a learning factory.