Digital Factory Twin: A Practioner-Driven Approach for Integrated Planning of the Enterprise Architecture

The Digital Factory Twin (DFT) is becoming more important in today's manufacturing world, but many companies are struggling to plan for its successful implementation. This paper suggests using an Enterprise Architecture (EA) Management approach to make this process easier and more effective. We start by mapping out current hurdles, challenges and problems in the implementation of the DFT with a Meta-Review on existing studies based on the research method of a Structured Literature Review. Based on that we derive problem fields. Based on this problem fields we propose an integrated planning approach, that helps with these and is focused on helping practitioners in a real-world environment getting the DFT into productive use. Our approach consists of the following phases: (1) Determine initial situation & target picture for the DFT incl. deriving a short list of suitable DFT use cases; (2) Company specific DFT design; (3) Plan EA changes.