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.