Towards a Human-Centric Digital Twin for Human-Machine Collaboration: A Review on Enabling Technologies and Methods

With the intent to further increase production efficiency while making human the centre of the processes, human-centric manufacturing focuses on concepts such as digital twins and human-machine collaboration. This paper presents enabling technologies and methods to facilitate the creation of human-centric applications powered by digital twins, also from the perspective of Industry 5.0. It analyses and reviews the state of relevant information resources about digital twins for human-machine applications with an emphasis on the human perspective, but also on their collaborated relationship and the possibilities of their applications. Finally, it presents the results of the review and expected future works of research in this area.

A Modular Framework for Data Processing at the Edge: Design and Implementation

There is a rapid increase in the number of edge devices in IoT solutions, generating vast amounts of data that need to be processed and analyzed efficiently. Traditional cloud-based architectures can face latency, bandwidth, and privacy challenges when dealing with this data flood. There is currently no unified approach to the creation of edge computing solutions. This work addresses this problem by exploring containerization for data processing solutions at the network's edge. The current approach involves creating a specialized application compatible with the device used. Another approach involves using containerization for deployment and monitoring. The heterogeneity of edge environments would greatly benefit from a universal modular platform. Our proposed edge computing-based framework implements a streaming extract, transform, and load pipeline for data processing and analysis using ZeroMQ as the communication backbone and containerization for scalable deployment. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, making it suitable for time-sensitive IoT applications.