Industrial Metaverse: Revolutionizing Industry 5.0 with Digital Twins and Extended Reality

The industrial sector is experiencing a paradigm shift to Industry 5.0, which emphasizes the integration of human ingenuity and advanced technologies. Central to this transformation is the convergence of digital twins and extended reality (XR), which together foster a more humancentric, technology-augmented industrial ecosystem. The dissertation looks into these transformative technologies within the context of the industrial metaverse, addressing the challenges that have impeded the convergence of digital and physical spaces in industrial settings. Foremost among these challenges is the limitation of current industrial XR solutions, which lack dynamic data interaction with digital twins and robust evaluation of control accuracy. This work addresses this gap by developing a mixed reality interface that actively interacts with a digital twinbased industrial crane, accompanied by measurement protocols for accessing the application's control accuracy. This application serves as a practical entry point into the industrial metaverse, illustrating how digital and physical elements can be synchronized for enhanced operation. Expanding on this foundation, the thesis tackles the scarcity of systematic integration of XR and digital twins across varied industrial machinery and environmental settings. By introducing the TwinXR method and implementing it on two case studies, the work enables scalable, efficient XR application development that leverages digital twin descriptions for enhanced information management and system interoperation across diverse industrial settings. Finally, the research proposes a comprehensive architecture of the industrial metaverse that extends beyond prevailing consumer-centric architectures and their narrow focus on XR. This architecture integrates physical factories with the metaverse through data flow and knowledge synchronization facilitated by the interplay of digital twins and semantic models. A case study on in-plant material flow tracking illustrates the practical application and benefits of this architecture in meeting the complex demands of industrial systems.Overall, the dissertation provides a thorough exploration of the industrial metaverse, traversing from focused applications to broader integration methodology, culminating in an expansive architectural design. The findings highlight the transformative impact of the industrial metaverse in the Industry 5.0 context, where digital twins and XR consolidate to reshape industrial processes and enhancing human-machine collaboration.