Sustainability Digital Twin: a tool for the manufacturing industry
Maria F. Davila R, Fenja Schwark, Lisa Dawel, Alexandra Pehlken
Abstract
The use of Digital Twins in the manufacturing industry has significantly increased in the past years, given its potential to contribute to solutions for the current environmental and digitalization challenges. To address the needs of the industry and achieve a higher level of sustainability a robust tool, such as a Digital Twin, must be used because the physical processes are highly complex, with constantly changing variables. On the other hand, current goals of the manufacturing sector, such as circular economy and zero-emissions, require data sharing in the supply chain. This paper presents the development of a framework for the assessment of energy efficiency and sustainability of production processes, with respect to the measured consumption of the different resources. In addition, a concept for privacy preserving data sharing within the manufacturing supply chain is presented. Two real case studies from the big component production industry located in northern Germany are discussed in this paper. As result, the framework is presented and the case study successfully identifies significant energy efficiency and sustainability optimization possibilities, achieved with very simple modeling.