Roles of digital twins on material performances and resource utilization on upstream industry (the case of textile industry)

Abstract

Supply chain processes are receiving considerable attention as a cutting-edge technology that will transform raw materials from material suppliers to the manufacturing and processing industries to fulfill customer requirements. However, the textile and apparel manufacturer industry faces many challenges on raw material and resource utilization scenario. To cope with those challenges, digital twin (DT) strategies have been a useful tool to visualize, realize, analyze, and utilize materials and integrate raw material accessibility, product quality, and delivery service systems into the production line or entire supply chain process. Nevertheless, the development and adoption of DTs is still infant and immature in most manufacturing industries. Mainly textile and apparel industries have weak practices in importance and roles of DT. This study aims to explore the role of DT technology impacts on raw material, design, production, lines in the textile and apparel industry and the entire their supply chain performance. Digital supply chain twins’ roles in material utilization, the production performance and the overall supply chain capabilities were investigated and studied in this paper. The  investigations shows that digital supply chain twin have a positive and direct  impacts on supply chain performance in supply chain visibility, raw material accessibility, real time decision making, process optimization, value chain optimization, resource utilization and visibility in a supply chain process of textile  and apparel industries. Both the primary and secondary data have been analyzed and studied using descriptive analysis, and Fuzzy TOPSIS tools. The relation between digital twins with resilience of digital enablers on supply chain process for sustainable supply chain process needs further study and investigations.

 Keywords: Digital Twin, Material Utilization, Cloud Computing, Textile and Apparel Industry, Physical Entities, Supply Chain, Performance