Lightweight digital twin as a service (LDTaaS): a cost-efficient digital transformation approach for manufacturing SMEs

The advent of Industry 4.0 has brought about a transformative digital revolution in the manufacturing sector. However, when compared to high-tech giants or large corporations, manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are notably falling behind in embracing this transition. Although manufacturing SMEs recognize the need to embrace this exciting industrial revolution to stay competitive, boost productivity, and fulfil customer expectations, they strive to balance the benefits of adopting new technologies with various obstacles, such as limited finances and expertise resources, outdated legacy systems and infrastructure, low level of digital skills, as well as scalability and flexibility issues. To address the dilemma faced by SME manufacturers in digital transformation, this paper introduces the concept of lightweight digital twin as a service (LDTaaS), which refers to the provision of lightweight digital twins (LDTs) as cloud-based services using a subscription-based model, aiming to provide a cost-effective and scalable digital transformation approach for SME manufacturers. Moreover, a reference architecture for LDTaaS is proposed, emphasizing modularity, interoperability, and synchronization, to facilitate the development and delivery of modular, scalable, and interoperable digital twin services. By providing digital twin perception, interaction, cognition, and application capabilities as a service on a subscription basis, LDTaaS offers a cost-effective and scalable approach for SME manufacturers to embark on their digital transformation journeys. The proposed concept and approach are validated with a cluster of footwear manufacturing SMEs, with increases of the annual total profit, improvement of inventory turnover ratio, enhancement of on-time delivery, reductions of operational errors and rework times. This study offers insights into cost-effective digital transformation solutions enabled by digital twins for manufacturing SMEs.