Sustainable Manufacturing: Digital Twinning for a Mechanical Assembly Production Line

There has been a rise in interest in the concept of the digital twin (DT) in both academia and industry in smart cities. The DT's implementation architecture generally consists of physical, virtual, and information-processing layers for a system. There are several theoretical frameworks presented and documented for DT implementation in the context of the manufacturing industry, but there is a lack of actual implementation studies published in the literature. The primary objective of this article is to show that a production unit that specialises in making manually assembled mechanical products can successfully adopt DT in practise. Tecnomatix Plant Simulation (P-sim) software was used to develop a simulation DT model. The DT then used for bottleneck identification to improve the efficiency of the production line. The DT proved to be a promising and evolving real-time optimisation tool for sustainable manufacturing.