A Reference Architecture for Digital Twin-Based Supply Chain Information Exchange

In this design science research project, based on the Catena-X automotive data space, we built a novel reference architecture for digital twin-based supply chain information sharing. The artifact aims at increasing supply reliability by sharing short-term information that is commonly not shared within a network of actors due to its sensitivity. Our architecture addresses these issues by providing measures for sensitive and compliant information sharing. Besides data sovereignty and compliance, we derived and fulfilled the design objectives of interoperability, up-to-date information, flexible information sharing and adoption. Our design project ran through two major design iterations of building and evaluating the architecture through the instantiation of a reference implementation that has been published as free open-source software.