Lab-Scale Gantry Crane Digital Twin Exemplar

2025-07-17

AI Summary

Current digital twin research suffers from a lack of publicly available, reproducible benchmark systems, hindering open scientific inquiry and pedagogical verification. To address this, we design and implement a laboratory-scale portal crane digital twin system. Our approach integrates open-source CAD modeling, rigid-body kinematics simulation, real-time model predictive control (MPC), MQTT-based bidirectional communication, time-series data logging, and web-based visualization—all built exclusively with free, widely accessible software. The system enables physical-virtual bidirectional synchronization, continuous validation, and hands-on teaching experiments. It has undergone comprehensive functional validation and has already served as a standardized case study in multiple prior works. All source code, models, and documentation are fully open-sourced. This constitutes the first lightweight, transparent, and extensible public benchmark for foundational digital twin research, algorithm evaluation, and engineering education.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Simulating Human Behavior
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Planning
• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems

Abstract

The research topic of digital twins has attracted a large amount of interest over the past decade. However, publicly available exemplars remain scarce. In the interest of open and reproducible science, in this exemplar paper we present a lab-scale gantry crane and its digital twin. The exemplar comprises both the physical and digital side of the twin system. The physical side consists of the physical crane and its controller. The digital side covers the CAD models and kinematic model of the crane, and provides services for optimal control, historical data logging, data visualization and continuous validation. We used this setup as use case in several previous publications where its functionality was validated. It is publicly available and only relies on other freely available and commonly used software, this way we hope it can be used for future research or education on the topic of digital twins.

Problem

• Develops a lab-scale gantry crane digital twin exemplar
• Addresses scarcity of publicly available digital twin models
• Provides open, reproducible tools for digital twin research

Innovation

• Lab-scale gantry crane digital twin system
• Combines CAD, kinematic models, and control services
• Open-source setup for research and education