Digital Twin for Smart Manufacturing: The Practitioner’s Perspective

The manufacturing sector is experiencing a technological paradigm shift, where new digital technologies can digitalize production systems and processes and generate big amount of data. The technology shift in manufacturing is referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 guide the companies to better utilize the new streams of data to achieve smart manufacturing so they can make better decisions and improve their productivity.

One of the essential technology concepts for this shift is digital twin. In Gartner’s 2017 report Hype Cycles of Emerging Technologies, digital twin was identified at the top of the hype and it is therefore considered as one the most important technologies for the coming years. The original concept of digital twin, provided by Grieves in 2002, describes that the digital twin is a digital informational construct of a physical system or an entity. The digital twin includes the digital information that is embedded in the physical system and the linkage with the physical system throughout the entire life cycle of the system. It is the new digital technologies that enables the connection between the digital twin and the physical system. These technologies may involve Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, smart sensors, and actuators to create digital information flows.

However, in practice, there are too many different definitions of digital twins and these different understandings cause a lot of confusion for practitioners. Therefore, the adoption and implementation of the concept in manufacturing have been difficult and slow.

A panel discussion at the Winter Simulation Conference in December 2019focuses on the simulation perspective of digital twin for manufacturing. The discussion includes how digital twins differ from traditional simulations as well as the new opportunities and challenges in the simulation community. This paper will continue on these topics of interest, but focusing more on the practitioners’ perspective for understanding how digital twins can be beneficial and better adopted by the manufacturing sector.

In a current research project in Sweden titled “Digitala stambanan” (i.e., The National Digital Highway), eight supply-chain companies from both discrete manufacturing and process industry are interviewed and studied to understand their current digital maturity levels and needs for digital solutions to stay competitive in the future. This paper will present the result of the research that includes the viewpoints of these companies in terms of the opportunities and challenges of implementing digital twins. The results are collected through semi-structured interviews performed with domain experts within the companies, these domain experts are knowledgeable of the production processes and IT landscape. Most of the companies involved are SMEs, representing different industries such as automotive and heavy vehicles in Sweden.  The results of this paper will provide a better understanding of what the current situations are out there in industry, what are the opportunities and challenges for implementing digital twins in their companies, and how we can help to expedite the adoption of the digital twin concept.