Currently, Digital Twins receive considerable attention from practitioners and in research. A Digital Twin describes a concept that connects physical and virtual objects through a data linkage. However, Digital Twins are highly dependent on their individual use case, which leads to a plethora of Digital Twin configurations. Based on a thorough literature analysis and two interview series with experts from various electrical and mechanical engineering companies, this paper proposes a set of archetypes of Digital Twins for individual use cases. It delimits the Digital Twins from related concepts, e.g., Digital Threads. The paper delivers profound insights into the domain of Digital Twins and, thus, helps the reader to identify the different archetypical patterns.

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Digital Twins offer considerable potential for cross-company networks. Recent research primarily focuses on using Digital Twins within the limits of a single organization. However, Shared Digital Twins extend application boundaries to cross-company utilization through their ability to act as a hub to share data. This results in the need to consider additional design dimensions which help practitioners design Digital Twins tailored for inter-company use. The article addresses precisely that issue as it investigates how Shared Digital Twins should be designed to achieve business success. For this purpose, the article proposes a set of design principles for Shared Digital Twins stemming from a qualitative interview study with 18 industry experts. The interview study is the primary data source for formulating and evaluating the design principles.

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