Implementation of Cognitive Digital Twins in Connected and Agile Supply Networks – an Operational model

Abstract

Supply chain agility and resilience are key factors for the success of manufacturing companies in their attempt to respond to dynamic changes. Circular economy, the need for optimized material flows, ad-hoc responses and personalization are some of the trends that require supply chains to become “cognitive”, i.e. able to predict trends and flexible enough in dynamic environments, ensuring optimized operational performance. Digital Twins (DTs) is a promising technology, and a lot of work is done on the factory level. In this paper, the concept of Cognitive Digital Twins (CDTs) and how they can be deployed in connected and agile supply chains is elaborated. The need for CDTs in the supply chain as well as the main CDT enablers and how they can be deployed under an operational model in agile networks is described. Emphasis is given on the modelling, cognition and governance aspects as well as on how a supply chain can be configured as a network of connected CDTs. Finally, a deployment methodology of the developed model into an example of a circular supply chain is proposed.

Digital twin-driven smart supply chain

“…Li et al (2020) propose a five-dimensional framework of a sustainable business model under the DTSC concept. Recently, Kalaboukas et al (2021) propose the concept of cognitive DTs for SCM, which are capable of predicting trends and flexible enough in dynamic environments. In addition to these general conceptual development, the DTSC concept has been discussed in several specified application fields, including circular supply chain (Preut et al, 2021), food supply chain (Smetana et al, 2021;Shoji et al, 2022), global port management (Wang et al, 2021), and logistics (Lee and Lee, 2021;Moshood et al, 2021;Park et al, 2021).…”