Edge-based Digital Twin to Trace and Ensure Sustainability in Cross-Company Production Networks

Manufacturing companies aim at ensuring ecological sustainability within their value-adding processes and sustainability indicators like CO2 emissions associated to a product are becoming important selling points for customers. In consequence, manufacturers investigate and measure their manufacturing processes in order to be able to provide respective numbers, which is however hampered if products are the result of cross-company production networks: Firstly, suppliers have a high understanding of their own processes which is required for an evaluation of the respective sustainability, but are often hesitant to publish this data. In addition, digital models that allow to quantify sustainability indicators require significant data exchanges. The goal of this paper is to describe a concept for an edge-based Digital Twin for the assessment of ecological sustainability in cross-company production networks. By directly computing sustainability indicators at the place of their origin, only a minimum amount of data is being transmitted. This enables to trace the sustainability of a manufactured product while not requiring suppliers to publish sensitive data or domain knowledge.