Enhancing Supply Chain Operations Using IoT and Digital Twin
In future , instrumenting cargo ships like Ever Given and the associated logistics can make the global shipping industry more robust .
4.2 BUILDING A DIGITAL TWIN
Once IoT sensors are implemented across the supply chain to collect useful data , the next step is aggregating and integrating that data to create a digital twin model of the physical assets such as the aircraft or the product being manufactured as well as of the end-to-end supply chain . A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical asset or process . It can be used to simulate the behavior of the asset or process , and to test different scenarios . A few examples of the public cloud services for building such IoT and digital twin solutions for supply chain are :
• Microsoft Azure IoT and Azure Digital Twins 3
• Amazon AWS IoT Twinmaker 4
• Google Supply Chain Twin and Pulse 5 as shown in Figure 4-1
Figure 4-1 : Supply Chain Twin and Pulse by Google .
There are other commercial digital twin solutions by General Electric , Bentley and some specialized providers as well . Digital twins can be used to improve supply chain operations in a number of ways . For example , they can be used to :
• Identify inefficiencies in the supply chain .
• Test different routing and scheduling scenarios .
3 https :// azure . microsoft . com / en-us / products / digital-twins
4 https :// aws . amazon . com / iot-twinmaker /
5 https :// cloud . google . com / solutions / supply-chain-twin Journal of Innovation 9