Digital twins (DTs) have been widely recognized as an enabling technology in the migration from a digitized manufacturing environment to the integration of the physical and digital worlds. The automotive industry is a leader in this migration due to the diversification and modification of products and the related increased production complexities.

Traditional applications of DTs have been focused on the development and management of either products or production facilities. However, the integration between these DTs has received less attention.

This paper presents an architecture for a system of digital twins that integrate product and production information in an automotive manufacturing industry. The architecture includes product DTs and various production related DTs, i.e. facility DTs, resource DTs, and executed process DTs. Additionally, the architecture includes process models that relate the product and production DTs. The architecture employes the “type digital aggregate” concept to provide the scalability required in a large automotive manufacturing context.

A preliminary evaluation shows that the architecture provides for the key functional requirements and non-functional requirements associated with a major automotive manufacturer. The evaluation also considers how the architecture applies some general principles for these types of highly modular architectures. Further evaluation is required to confirm the architecture’s efficacy. It is envisaged that the integration of DTs across product and production domains in the automotive manufacturing industry will enhance operational excellence, overall product quality, and process traceability.