Designing a Process-Oriented Digital Twin for Industrial Testing Laboratories

Digital twins have gained significant attention in recent years as a means to represent physical objects digitally. It is now applied for planning, monitoring, and decision-making across various domains. While extensively leveraged in manufacturing, digital twins also present promising opportunities in other process-intensive sectors, such as the testing, inspection, and calibration industries. Industrial testing laboratories face challenges such as cost pressures and efficiency demands, operating within a complex socio-technical and highly regulated environment. Current digital solutions, such as laboratory information management systems, fall short of providing a comprehensive data and process management perspective and do not fully comply with the ISO/IEC 17025 standard, which ensures trust in laboratory operations and results. This article aims to address these gaps by proposing a set of design principles and a software architecture for a process-oriented digital lab twin developed through a design science research approach. The artifact is evaluated through expert interviews, a prototypical implementation, and a field study in an industrial laboratory setting. The findings offer valuable insights for designing digital twins in laboratory process management, guiding future research and practical applications.