## 2 Materials and Methods
### Production Environment Description  
The pilot company specializes in small-batch, order-based production. Products are made-to-order, often in varying quantities and combinations, which creates a highly dynamic and variable production flow. The shop floor is divided into functional workstations, including fabric cutting, sewing, printing, and packaging. Before the pilot, the company relied heavily on manual data entry and Excel-based reporting, which limited visibility into real-time performance and made it challenging to detect inefficiencies across workstations [13]. The project aimed to implement a more automated and interpretable system for production monitoring, bottleneck detection, and decision support. The production system is structured into sequential workstation zones, each responsible for specific stages of the process. These include fabric cutting, preparation, printing, and packaging. Figure 2 illustrates the physical layout of the production area, highlighting the relative positions of the workstations involved in the pilot implementation. This layout informed sensor placement, data mapping, and the clustering logic used throughout the study.  
Figure 1: Digital twin framework utilized in pilot SME, integrating real-time data collection and validation, clustering analysis, and simulation for decision support.  
Table 1 presents the list of workstation codes used in the pilot implementation, along with their corresponding functions and process descriptions. These stations represent the core steps in the company's small-batch production workflow, including material handling, cutting, preparation, pressing, quality control, sewing, and packaging. The coding was used in both data collection and simulation modeling to map digital records to physical operations.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Code** & **Workstation/Activity** & **Process Description** \\ \hline KJ-KL010 & Staging and material placement & Marking and transporting material from fabric storage \\ KJ-JL020 & Cutting & Cutting material according to the cutting order \\ KJ-VD031 & White parts preparation & Preparing white fabric parts for pressing \\ KJ-VD032 & White parts preparation & Preparing white fabric parts for pressing \\ KJ-VD033 & White parts preparation & Preparing white fabric parts for pressing \\ KJ-VD034 & White parts preparation & Preparing white fabric parts for pressing \\ KJ-PL040 & Plotter & Preparing press rollers for sublimation \\ KJ-PR050 & Pressing & Pressing visual elements onto white parts \\ KJ-KK061 & Quality control & Inspecting the quality of pressed parts \\ KJ-KK062 & Quality control & Inspecting the quality of pressed parts \\ KJ-KK063 & Quality control & Inspecting the quality of pressed parts \\ KJ-KK064 & Quality control & Inspecting the quality of pressed parts \\ KJ-OM070 & Sewing & Sewing product components \\ KJ-PA080 & Packaging & Packaging finished products \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: Workstation codes, activities, and process descriptions used in the pilot SME.  
Figure 2: Physical layout of the production area with marked workstation zones used in the pilot implementation.