Implementation of a digital twin framework in the modular housing industry

The construction industry is one of the minor digitized industries, and it has been characterized by a below-average increase in productivity in recent decades. The modular housing sector copies the production system of the manufacturing industry to meet these deficits, which makes it a perfect example for evaluating Industry 4.0 technologies. This paper explores the methodology and possibilities of implementing a digital twin of a modular housing production plant to optimize its production. The proposed approach based on a Digital Twin (DT) framework consists of three consecutive parts: (1) analyzing the production system by using the Lean tool of Value-Stream Mapping extended (x-VSM) towards Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) models, (2) collecting real-time data to track and trace the system's bottleneck by using Radio-Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) as a Tracking-and-Tracing system (TaT), and (3) optimizing it by using DES. Three scenarios to eliminate waste, increase throughput, and identify the best possible TaT implementation have been simulated. The results are a 64 % inventory reduction, a 20 % faster production lead time, and the finding of the critical part to be tracked using RFID. The resulting model has shown to be a valuable instrument for understanding the different process interdependencies. Moreover, it has been used as a support tool for middle management to assess the impact of different optimization approaches quantitatively. Overall, this paper shows the implications of combining DES and TaT systems towards a DT of a modular housing production plant.