Towards a scalable reference architecture for Digital Twin implementation in Latin American industries: a PRISMA-based state-of-the-art review

Digital Twin (DT) literature remains dispersed with respect to architecture, infrastructure, interoperability, deployment, standards, and brownfield integration when these are analysed jointly. This systematic review (PRISMA 2020) outlines a scalable, adaptable DT reference architecture from Scopus (606 records). Thirteen additional seed references support the theoretical, standardisation, implementation-maturity, and Latin America-oriented discussion, but they are reported as a separate purposive set rather than pooled with the systematic corpus. Eleven complementary sources provide recent sectoral evidence, official framework documentation, and Latin American contextual evidence; these sources remain outside the frozen search and PRISMA counts. The 23 PRISMA-selected studies constitute the formal synthesis corpus and were assessed with a structured quality-appraisal framework. Research is conceptually mature; implementation architecture is not, as reference models, interoperability, data integration, cloud-edge deployment, and brownfield work are rarely combined into repeatable implementation logic. The synthesis is consolidated into a layered reference architecture whose components are traced back to the reviewed evidence and systematically compared against ISO 23247, RAMI 4.0 and the Asset Administration Shell, the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture, and the Digital Twin Consortium capability framework. A standard architecture is globally needed; Latin America’s infrastructure heterogeneity, legacy systems, and constrained investment make these gaps consequential.