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Abstract
An efficient and effective spare parts supply chain management is crucial to ensure highly available production systems. However, achieving such a spare parts supply chain management is challenging due to the intrinsic characteristics of spare parts. Traditional spare parts supply chains (TSPSCs) adopt large spare parts inventories to tackle such intrinsic characteristics, with disadvantages in terms of high inventory costs. Recently, Additive Manufacturing (AM) has shown breakthrough potential, allowing the transition from TSPSCs to digital spare parts supply chains (DSPSCs), where spare parts are no longer stored in large amounts but are stored digitally and produced only when needed. However, despite DSPSCs benefits, a complete transition from TSPSCs to DSPSCs is still far from becoming reality. Indeed, hindering such a transition is a lack of expertise in three main areas, i.e. how to design, operate, and control and monitor a DSPSC. With this position paper, we envision how a digital twin (DT) could overcome these issues, enabling a full transition to a DSPSC. Moreover, this work further concretely suggests how such a DT could be developed, providing the basis for developing both the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary to render DSPSCs a reality.
Sustainable Development Goals:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mirco Peron
Mirco Peron is an Assistant professor of Supply Chain Management at NEOMA Business School in France. His research deals with Additive Manufacturing in Operations & Supply Chain Management and with Hydrogen Supply Chains, with his research outputs being published in journals like International Journal of Production Economics and International Journal of Production Research. His works ‘Additive or Conventional Manufacturing for Spare Parts: Effect of Failure Rate Uncertainty on the Sourcing Option Decision’ and ‘An Environmental Decision Support System for Determining On-Site or Off-Site Additive Manufacturing of Spare Parts’ have been awarded the best paper award at MIM2022 conference and the best student paper award at the APMS2023 conference, respectively. He has also been involved on several national and international project, and he is member of the editorial board of several international journals.