Internet of Things and Shop-Floor Digital Twin: an Aerospace case study

The adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology in the Industry 4.0 framework is increasingly on the rise. Industrial organizations, including those operating in the aerospace sector, are interested in exploiting sensed data in a virtual environment. The Digital Twin (DT) emerges as the virtual counterpart of a real-world system for analysing, monitoring and simulating its behaviour and supporting decisions process. While the concepts of both IoT and DT are widely discussed by the academia, empirical demonstrations on their synergic integration seem to lack in the literature. Considering the HexaSFDT framework, this paper aims to narrow this gap and to discuss a practical case study of an aerospace company. Moreover, it focuses on contextualizing the framework in a process-oriented DT. Following a collaborative approach, several interviews have been conducted with both operational and strategic profiles of the aerospace company. Data flows sensed from the industrial scenario have been analysed to monitor the behaviour of the critical materials management process. Accordingly, the HexaSFDT framework has been customized for fitting the process of the case study. The paper provides a double implication. It discusses the adoption of IoT and DT technologies by presenting an empirical research. Also, through an industrial case study, it supports practitioners, and in particular aerospace companies, in understanding how these technologies can be leveraged to assist people in decision-making.