Achieving Sustainable Manufacturing by Embedding Sustainability KPIs in Digital Twins

The manufacturing industry requires highly flexible and dynamic production lines that shift from conventional mass production to cover the requirements and fulfill demands. Customized production may reduce production waste but has not been studied to a wide extent. The advancement of digital technologies, e.g., Digital Twins, enable factories to collect real-time data. Also, they can enable remote monitoring of the production processes by establishing bi-directional flows of data between the physical and virtual spaces. This study draws its sight to the potential of digital manufacturing to improve sustainability in production systems by making use of Digital Twins. This research work performs a literature review and identifies suitable KPIs for a DES model and evaluates the impact in a drone factory in four scenarios that test final assembly processes. The findings of this work can pose a first step toward the future development of a digital twin.