A digital twin-enabled digital spare parts supply chain

Abstract

An efficient and effective spare parts supply chain management is crucial to ensure highly available production systems. However, achieving such a spare parts supply chain management is challenging due to the intrinsic characteristics of spare parts. Traditional spare parts supply chains (TSPSCs) adopt large spare parts inventories to tackle such intrinsic characteristics, with disadvantages in terms of high inventory costs. Recently, Additive Manufacturing (AM) has shown breakthrough potential, allowing the transition from TSPSCs to digital spare parts supply chains (DSPSCs), where spare parts are no longer stored in large amounts but are stored digitally and produced only when needed. However, despite DSPSCs benefits, a complete transition from TSPSCs to DSPSCs is still far from becoming reality. Indeed, hindering such a transition is a lack of expertise in three main areas, i.e. how to design, operate, and control and monitor a DSPSC. With this position paper, we envision how a digital twin (DT) could overcome these issues, enabling a full transition to a DSPSC. Moreover, this work further concretely suggests how such a DT could be developed, providing the basis for developing both the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary to render DSPSCs a reality.