How can you optimize production scheduling with digital twins?

2 Increase flexibility

Another advantage of digital twins is that they can increase your flexibility and responsiveness to changing customer needs, market conditions, and operational issues. With digital twins, you can quickly adjust your production schedule to account for demand fluctuations, order changes, inventory levels, and equipment availability. You can also use digital twins to explore alternative scenarios, such as adding or removing resources, shifting priorities, or modifying processes. By using digital twins, you can optimize your production schedule for different objectives, such as cost, quality, or delivery time, and balance trade-offs.

3 Enhance collaboration

Digital twins can also enhance collaboration and communication among different stakeholders involved in production scheduling, such as planners, engineers, managers, and operators. By using a common digital platform, you can share your production schedule with everyone in real time, and get feedback and input from different perspectives. You can also use digital twins to visualize your production schedule in 3D, and interact with it using augmented or virtual reality. This way, you can improve your understanding of your production process, and align your goals and expectations.

4 Improve learning

Digital twins can also improve your learning and continuous improvement capabilities for production scheduling. By using digital twins, you can collect and analyze data from your production process, and compare it with your production plan. You can then use this data to measure your performance, identify gaps, and discover opportunities for improvement. You can also use digital twins to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, such as optimization algorithms, predictive analytics, and reinforcement learning, to generate optimal production schedules based on your data and preferences.

5 Support innovation

Digital twins can also support your innovation and experimentation efforts for production scheduling. By using digital twins, you can create and test new production concepts, such as new products, processes, or technologies, without affecting your current operations. You can also use digital twins to simulate the impact of these innovations on your production schedule, and evaluate their feasibility, viability, and desirability. By using digital twins, you can foster a culture of innovation, and accelerate your time to market.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?