Digital Twin Application to Energy Consumption Management in Production: A Literature Review

Abstract

Economic and environmental issues that translate into energy costs and contaminations in production are growingly attracting attention from several parts and actors. Therefore, Energy Consumption Management (ECM) is gaining ever higher importance within production environments. Industry 4.0 provides several opportunities to address these challenges. One of the technologies presenting the best potentialities is the Digital Twin (DT), which has been found able to promote ECM improvements related to production assets and processes in different ways. Nonetheless, in the academic literature has not been found an extensive review of DT application to ECM in manufacturing. Therefore, this paper proposes a systematic literature review to investigate the current state of the art of the applications, features and characteristics, and implementation strategies of DT applied to ECM in production contexts. Attention has been also paid to the human role inside the application of the DT technology to ECM and the interaction modalities between humans and the DT itself.