Abstract Digital Twins (DTs) play an important role in current digitalization trends across industries. As maritime markets are particularly affected by recent global tendencies such as increasing delivery costs or political pressure for decarbonization, DT solutions could provide important support for shipbuilding and shipping companies to master recent and upcoming challenges. This paper provides a brief insight into the current state of the maritime industry and shows possible use-cases for DT Ship applications throughout the entire product lifecycle. To further advance the general understanding of DTs and their implementation, the concept of a Maritime Digital Twin Architecture (MDTA) is proposed to structure practical DT features.