Can a Byte Improve Our Bite? An Analysis of Digital Twins in the Food Industry

Abstract

The food industry faces many challenges, including the need to feed a growing population, food loss and waste, and inefficient production systems. To cope with those challenges, digital twins that create a digital representation of physical entities by integrating real-time and real-world data seem to be a promising approach. This paper aims to provide an overview of digital twin applications in the food industry and analyze their challenges and potentials. Therefore, a literature review is executed to examine digital twin applications in the food supply chain. The applications found are classified according to a taxonomy and key elements to implement digital twins are identified. Further, the challenges and potentials of digital twin applications in the food industry are discussed. The survey revealed that the application of digital twins mainly targets the production (agriculture) or the food processing stage. Nearly all applications are used for monitoring and many for prediction. However, only a small amount focuses on the integration in systems for autonomous control or providing recommendations to humans. The main challenges of implementing digital twins are combining multidisciplinary knowledge and providing enough data. Nevertheless, digital twins provide huge potentials, e.g., in determining food quality, traceability, or designing personalized foods.

Design, Modeling and Implementation of Digital Twins

“…Lo et al [ 54 ] review DTs created to improve the product design and development process. Henrichs et al [ 120 ] review DT applications in the food industry. They analyze how DTs can be used to solve problems, such as how to feed a growing population, how to avoid food loss and waste and how to improve the existing inefficient production systems.…”

Digital Twins in the Automotive Industry: The Road toward Physical-Digital Convergence

“…The monitoring of land assets by installing various tools and sensors, i.e., in water, temperature, and humidity, for crop protection, maximization of profits, and reduction of failures [36][37][38][39][40][41].…”

Physics-based digital twins for autonomous thermal food processing: Efficient, non-intrusive reduced-order modeling

“…We have witnessed the advent of Digital Twins in the field of food science and technology in the last two years, which explains why the relevant literature is still scarce. A recent literature review by Henrichs et al, 2022 elucidates that few food science studies considered autonomy of Table 1: Common features of the Digital Twin concept in literature.…”

“…The potential added value of Digital Twins for food science has been acknowledged by Verboven et al, 2020 andHenrichs et al, 2022) in their reviews, which focused on Big Data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and sensorization. A picture of Digital Twins as an augmented reality monitoring system in real time was envisioned.…”

“…Verboven et al, 2020 noted that nowadays, complex physics-based models would not be solvable in real time. The review by Henrichs et al, 2022 focused on the value chain and production planning at the shop floor level. An example of this "scheduling" perspective on Digital Twins can be found in the article by Koulouris, Misailidis, and Petrides, 2021. Based on the criteria in Table 1, we find manuscripts that partially fulfill the features of Digital Twins.…”