Agilechains: Agile supply chains through smart digital twins

Currently, production and logistics performance of a single organization are only partially dependent on the internal resources, but more and more often, they also depend on the interactions that happen across the so-called supply chain, that is, the interactions between the organization and its customers and suppliers. In particular, the production and logistics coordination between actors in the supply chain is often a difficult activity which draws significant resources. Also, such coordination requires continuous revisions and updates to be performed. In Industry 4.0, the digital twins paradigm is currently adopted to represent, simulate and test the behavior of one or more machines and production plants belonging to an organization. This paper introduces the AgileChains paradigm, extending the digital twin paradigm to supply chains and the dynamics of their participants. This extension also positively affects the reactivity and resilience of the internal processes in case the supply chain has to be reconfigured. We propose a novel conceptual framework that combines Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) with Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), in order to create service oriented systems suited for exchanging data in a dynamic and adaptive way. In addition, we propose a novel data management mechanism capable of finding the right balance between the internal needs of each organization when handling their data and the need to securely and efficiently export data in the supply chain (cf. smart data movement ). Finally, we plan to define governance tools to model and manage the supply chain that treat agility as a first-class citizen. These tools will allow users to dynamically and predictively change the involved actors, as well as the nature of the exchanged data and the data exchange policies, focusing in particular on adverse, risk-prone events, so to minimize the risk and to optimize the supply chain performance both in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.