ECCOMAS 2024

A Human-Centric Approach to Modeling a Digital Twin

  • Palmer, Claire (Loughborough University)
  • Grant, Rebecca (Loughborough University)
  • Goh, Yee (Loughborough University)
  • Hubbard, Ella-Mae (Loughborough University)

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Digital Twins form one of the enabling technologies for Industry 5.0, which is an approach placing employees at the centre of the manufacturing process. A human-centric approach requires knowledge of human intentions and tasks. Control task analysis (ConTA) identifies the work domain situations and/or functions before considering the control tasks required for the work domain. In ConTA, a decision ladder provides a modelling tool to identify and display control tasks, encapsulating the questions posed by decision-makers and the system at each stage of the decision-making process. A persona represents a typical user that interacts with a system or product. In the research described here a set of personas were created to represent user interactions with a Digital Twin. The control tasks for the Digital Twin domain were elicited through interview questions presented to 6 groups of 2-4 experts. The interview questions were created by customising prompts and keywords to the to the personas of the Digital Twin. From these questions decision ladders were created to consider how humans interact with a Digital Twin. It was discovered that considering personas occurring within a Digital Twin system provided an effective method of gathering information for a decision ladder.