Improving industrial sustainability by the use of digital twin models in maintenance and production activities

Abstract

The industrial world is undergoing a digitalization process, in which information and communication technologies bring new opportunities for sustainable development. The Digital Twin (DT) technology is mentioned in the literature as one of the main tools to support production and maintenance activities and can effectively contribute to the achievement of sustainability goals. The aim of this study is to investigate, through the results of a systematic literature review, the state-of-the-art and the opportunities that the adoption of DT technology can bring for the realization of sustainable industrial maintenance and production activities. The review results show a growing interest in this field of research, in which, the DT has been applied in different industrial sectors, and considers a variety of maintenance and production activities. Furthermore, this paper investigates how the sustainability issue is addressed by the current DT literature and a list of the sustainability criteria considered with the respective frequency of use was provided. This study reveals that the economic dimension of sustainability is the most considered, followed by the environmental dimension, and lastly by the social dimension. Moreover, the majority of the analysed studies explore few sustainability issues: energy cost and efficiency are the most frequently used criteria in sustainable maintenance and production.