Opportunities and Gaps in Supply Chain Digital Twin Deployments, a Biopharmaceutical Industry Focus

Published

March 16, 2026

Author(s)

Perawit Charoenwut, Boonserm Kulvatunyou, Stephen Wing

Abstract

Digital twin (DT) is an emerging technology that promises to advance the performances in manufacturing and supply chain. This technology has been implemented and used in many other adjacent industries and similar appli-cations. Supply chain resilience is one of the key performances identified in the United States (U.S.) national directive, particularly for the biopharma-ceutical industry. The objective of this paper is to examine the opportuni-ties of using DT in addressing challenges in the U.S. Biopharmaceutical (BP) supply chains and identify gaps in realizing such opportunities. The paper first documents the current state and challenges of the BP supply chains, classifying them into global supply risks, traceability needs, transi-tioning to continuous manufacturing, decentralized production, complex cold chain logistics, and supply-demand uncertainty. Through a compre-hensive literature review, we explore the definition of the supply chain DT and analyze how a full deployment of a bidirectional supply chain DT and supporting technologies, including the Internet of Things and blockchain, may address these challenges through three key DT functionalities. The analysis shows potential benefits from these functionalities, including real-time monitoring, simulations, and optimizations. They can enhance supply chain visibility, improve demand prediction, help manage risks, and in-crease responsiveness to disruptions. Though research shows benefits in the supply chain DT deployment, there is limited evidence of DT deploy-ments in the BP industry. To that end, three gaps and respective future re-search that must be addressed for an effective implementation are identified, namely data quality and accessibility, data privacy and security, and tools to help assess the return on investment. This research contributes to under-standing how DT can transform BP supply chains and provides practical in-sights for advancing DT adoption.

Citation

ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4071384

Local Download

Keywords

Supply Chain Digital Twin, Biopharmaceutical Supply Chain, Supply Chain Resilience

Citation

Charoenwut, P. , Kulvatunyou, B. and Wing, S. (2026), Opportunities and Gaps in Supply Chain Digital Twin Deployments, a Biopharmaceutical Industry Focus, ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, [online], https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4071384, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=960155 (Accessed March 31, 2026)