A digital twin-enabled Industrial Metaverse architecture for production system design: Evidence from an implementation in the automotive industry

The ongoing industrial transformation toward more resilient and human-centric manufacturing systems has driven increasing interest in the Industrial Metaverse. This concept integrates technologies such as digital twins and extended reality to enable shared, immersive, and persistent virtual environments that support interactive simulation and collaborative design. Despite its growing relevance, research on the Industrial Metaverse remains largely conceptual, with limited empirical evidence from industrial settings. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a digital twin-enabled Industrial Metaverse architecture for production system design. The architecture defines the key technological components, their functions, and the communication mechanisms required to ensure interoperability among them. An industrial implementation in an automotive company demonstrates the architecture’s technical feasibility and its ability to support human-machine interaction and collaborative design. The study also outlines key technical and managerial lessons learned and discusses implications for broader industrial adoption. The proposed architecture provides an empirically grounded reference for deploying collaborative Industrial Metaverse environments during production system design.