Foundry Operations in Unified Supply Chain Digital Twins: A Cross-Industry Literature Review

Abstract The foundry industry is among the industries with the highest potential for digitalization, and occupies a critical, intermediate position in the industrial value chain, supplying cast components to the automotive, machinery, infrastructure, and energy sectors. To unlock this potential and enable cross-industry interoperability, digital twins (DTs) offer a promising approach for minimizing time, costs, and environmental impacts. This exploratory scoping review maps the existing literature on each pillar of the idea and calls for further research on this topic. The aim of this paper is to explore the existing literature, identify the problems, and discuss what research is necessary to address them from a holistic perspective. The methods are explained in three main topics: (i) scope of existing research, (ii) literature-based maturity assessment models for DTs, and (iii) specific methods employed in current studies. This review identifies key themes in the results, including methods for measuring digital twin maturity, current initiatives, and reference frameworks, interoperable data spaces, and available modeling software. The subsequent discussion addresses the challenges of advancing DT maturity and achieving cross-sector interoperability, the semantic, technical, and governance requirements that follow for foundry DTs, and the challenges that interoperable DTs can address, drawing on the reviewed initiatives, maturity models, and application cases from the foundry industry and from neighboring industries such as mining. The review answers four research questions on the challenges of the foundry industry, on DT maturity models, on interoperability initiatives and applications, and on the requirements for foundry digital twins. It collects the evidence from the literature for the view that the foundry industry is a digital bottleneck in the supply chains of cast products without testing it, and highlights the resulting research gaps. Ultimately, this work provides a structured review and a research agenda that reduces ambiguity and outlines future standardization efforts and research directions toward sustainable, digitalized foundry operations.