Realizing Waste-Reducing Potential in Small-Lot Production with Digital Twins

New digital technologies are integrated to improve production. The Lean manufacturing paradigm is the foremost approach to creating efficient processes in the industry. In small-lot production, improvements include optimizing the process and decision-making for controlling the quality of the final product, reducing production time, and saving energy. This research overviews existing combinations of Lean manufacturing and Industry 4.0 technologies by literature review and discusses the potential of the digital twins in lean manufacturing. The objective of this paper is to investigate the potential of digital twins, as a state-of-the-art technology in industry 4,0, in small-lot production in the metal-cutting industry. As a result, a digital twins framework with five layers is proposed to use in the product design and manufacturing phase of a product lifecycle with a lean waste paradigm. The tasks of these layers are to transfer data from the physical space to the virtual space, extract information and knowledge, analyses them to select the appropriate manufacturing parameters, evaluate the results, and predict the status of the production. The framework enables the users to optimize the process planning and make decisions based on the updated data from the physical shop floor.