Digital twins have revolutionized manufacturing and maintenance, allowing us to interact with virtual yet realistic representations of the physical world in simulations to identify potential problems or opportunities for improvement. However, traditional digital twins do not have the ability to communicate with humans using natural language, which limits their potential usefulness. Although conventional natural language processing methods have proven to be effective in solving certain tasks, neuro-symbolic AI offers a new approach that leads to more robust and versatile solutions. In this paper, we propose neuro-symbolic reasoning (NSR)-a fundamental method for interacting with 3D digital twins using natural language. The method understands user requests and contexts to manipulate 3D components of digital twins and is able to read maintenance manuals and implement installations and removal procedures autonomously. A practical neuro-symbolic dataset of machine-understandable manuals, 3D models, and user queries is collected to train the neuro-symbolic reasoning interaction mechanism. The evaluation demonstrates that NSR can execute user commands accurately, achieving 96.2% accuracy on test data. The proposed method has industrial importance since it provides the technology to perform maintenance procedures, request information from manuals, and serve as a tool to interact with complex virtual machinery using natural language.
Keywords: Boeing 737; Industry 4.0; aircraft maintenance education; artificial intelligence; digital twin; internet of things; language understanding; neuro-symbolic AI; smart maintenance.