The increasing growth of digital technologies in manufacturing has provided industry with opportunities to improve its productivity and operations. One such opportunity is the digital thread, which links product lifecycle systems so that shared data may be used to improve design and manufacturing processes. The development of the digital thread has been challenged by the inherent difficulty of aggregating and applying context to data from heterogeneous systems across the product lifecycle. This paper presents a reference four-tiered architecture designed to manage the data generated by manufacturing systems for the digital thread. The architecture provides segregated access to internal and external clients, which protects intellectual property and other sensitive information, and enables the fusion of manufacturing and other product lifecycle data. We have implemented the architecture with a contract manufacturer and used it to generate knowledge and identify performance improvement opportunities that would otherwise be unobservable to a manufacturing decision maker.

制造业中数字技术的不断增长为行业提供了提高生产率和运营的机会。数字线程就是这样一种机会，它可以链接产品生命周期系统，以便可以使用共享数据来改善设计和制造过程。在整个产品生命周期中，将异构环境中的数据聚合并将其应用于异构系统中的数据时，固有的困难使数字线程的开发面临挑战。本文提出了一种参考四层体系结构，该体系结构旨在管理数字线程制造系统生成的数据。该体系结构提供了对内部和外部客户端的单独访问，从而保护了知识产权和其他敏感信息，并实现了制造和其他产品生命周期数据的融合。