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Sawmills are key elements of the forest product industry supply chain, and they play important economic, social, and environmental roles. Sawmill production planning and control are, however, challenging owing to several factors, including, but not limited to, the heterogeneity of the raw material. The emerging concept of digital twins introduced in the context of Industry 4.0 has generated high interest and has been studied in a variety of domains, including production planning and control. In this paper, we investigate the benefits digital twins would bring to the sawmill industry via a literature review on the wider subject of sawmill production planning and control. Opportunities facilitating their implementation, as well as ongoing challenges from both academic and industrial perspectives, are also studied.

International audience; Predicting the set of lumbers which would be obtained from sawing a log at a specific sawmill is a difficult problem, which complicates short and mid term decision making in this industry. While sawmill simulators able to simulate the sawing of a log from a 3D scan of its outer shape exist, they can be extremely computationally intensive. Several alternative approaches based on machine learning algorithms and different set of features were explored in previous works. This paper proposes the use of one hidden layer perceptrons, and a vector of features build from dissimilarities from the scans to a set of selected wood logs, chosen as the class medoids. Several architectures are tested and compared to validate the pertinence of the proposed set of medoid-based features. The lowest mean squared error was obtained for MISO neural networks with a sigmoid output activation function, to constrain the output value ranges.