Product Customization based on Digital Twin and Cloud Manufacturing within a Decentralized Production System

Industry 4.0 represents a turning point in the thinking of the production model since it is based on digitalized production systems with the aim of improving productivity, product quality, and delivery time to the customer.The digitalization and evolution of information technology allowed the emulation of production system virtual models, namely in the concept of Digital Twin (DT), with the ability to simulate different scenarios providing support for better decision making. This concept not only represents a virtual copy of the physical world that obtains information about the state of the value chain but also illustrates a system capable of changing the development of the production activity according to the fulfillment of the intended business goals. In literature, the concept of the Digital Twin is exhaustively treated as a stand-alone factory (one digital factory represents one physical factory) and underestimates the possibility of a DT oriented to a customized product (a project) that requires decentralized production systems.This paper brings to discussion the relevance of product customized applying DT to smart customization, and the inclusion of decentralized production systems supported by Cloud Manufacturing.