Digital Twins for Decision Support in Production Planning and Control: A Conceptual Framework and Research Directions

With the advent of Industry 4.0, manufacturing is being reshaped by the adoption of digital technologies, which can support and enhance design and management activities in production systems. Within this context, the concept of the Digital Twin emerged as a new paradigm which enriches simulation modeling capabilities to forecast and analyze impacts related to production management decisions. In this context, the paper analyzes the state of the art of Digital Twins and their decision support through a systematic literature review. The novelty introduced in this work consists of a conceptual framework for the roles of Digital Twins with respect to decision support in Production Planning and Control. The framework first builds on the functional characterization of Digital Twins, which provides a set of use cases to describe how a Digital Twin can work to support decisions; then, the target applications are further analyzed, including process planning, production planning, scheduling, production control and dynamic scheduling. Finally, in light of Digital Twin capabilities extending traditional simulation modeling, this work outlines major characteristics and research directions in terms of the adoption of Digital Twins.