Roles of digital twins on material performances and utilization on upstream industry (The case of automotive industry)

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 automobile part and body manufacturer industry faces many challenges. 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 of DTs is still hampered by a number of factors, such as a lack of full understanding of the concept of DTs and problems with DT strategies in the automobile and related manufacturing industries. This study aims to explore the role of DT technology impacts on production lines in the automobile industry and entire supply chain performance. Digital supply chain twins' roles in material utilization, the production performance and the overall supply chain capabilities were investigated in this study. The investigations shows that digital supply chain twin have a positive and direct impacts on supply chain performance in supply chain visibility, real time decision making, process optimization, value chain optimization, resource utilization and visibility in a supply chain process of automotive and body manufacturing industries. Both the primary and secondary data have been analyzed and studied using descriptive analysis, analytical hierarchy process (AHP) 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.