Digital twins for industrial decision-making

Industry4.0 and digital twins are concepts which have been proposed for industrial production systems. The impact on decision-making and how legacy systems need to migrate towards service-oriented decision support systems is less well understood. In this paper, we identify a decision system as a chain of connected but autonomous and loosely-coupled decision processes. We propose digital twins as a framework over these processes in order to make holistic decisions without the need of building a single, tightly integrated decision model. We discuss bottlenecks and potential pathways using the case of reconfigurable manufacturing, which brings forward some of these complexities in planning and scheduling of assembly systems. A novel digital twin architecture is discussed that better models service-oriented decision systems in Industry4.0.