Decision-making in a fast fashion company in the Industry 4.0 era: a Digital Twin proposal to support operational planning

This work explores the improvement of operational decision-making in a Fast Fashion manufacturing company, considering the Industry 4.0 era. The segment requires agile and flexible decision-making techniques to guarantee the companies survival in a high variety environment of products and demand. The proposed approach was based on three stages. First, we suggested changes and improvements in the system to adapt it to the Industry 4.0 principles. Then, we proposed a Digital Twin (DT) focused on operational resource planning (physical and human). The DT was composed of a Discrete Event Simulation model, an Artificial Intelligence model, and a decision dashboard that provides a user-friendly interface for the decision-maker. Finally, the last stage corresponds to cyclical and constant DT-based decision-making. The DT-based decisions helped to decrease the number of operators in the line reducing their idleness and, at the same time, the total lead time became shorter. Therefore, we highlight that the concepts and solutions of Industry 4.0 might be consistent with small companies without major structural changes, contributing to the evolution of the manufacturing systems.