Prof. Marco Macchi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)

Digital twins for operations management: research challenges and opportunities

Abstract:

The cyber-physical integration is an essential enabler for smart factories. It allows to nurture intelligence by facilitating the exploitation of advanced analytics, modelling, simulation, and optimization in manufacturing operations management. The cyber part is particularly interesting as it brings the real novelties, introducing a virtualization of the manufacturing systems through the development of digital twins of the production assets and systems. In the context of operations management, this allows to bring about novel supervisory control capabilities. The presentation will then address this new field for research, focusing on advanced methods to predict and optimize the production system behavior in its running time. Operations and maintenance perspectives will be provided during the speech.  

Marco Macchi is Full Professor at the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. His teaching and research activities regard industrial technologies, asset lifecycle management, operations and maintenance management, smart manufacturing. Serving the scientific community, he is currently the Chair of the technical committee IFAC TC 5.1 Manufacturing Plant Control; he is Member of the IFIP WG 5.7 Advances in Production Management Systems; he is co-leader of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on “Product and Asset Lifecycle Management” at the IFIP TC5 WG 5.7 Advances in Production Management Systems; he is a fellow of the International Society of Engineering Asset Management (ISEAM). Concerning his role in scientific journals, he is Member of the International Editorial Board of Production Planning & Control: the Management of Operations, and he is Associate Editor of the Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing.