The digital twin is recognized as a key technology for the digital transition in the industry. Nevertheless, even if the digital twin is relatively a new concept, this term has been overused in the last years, and this without any unanimous definitions, models, or standards. Moreover, the main issue to be tackled when developing digital twins, is defining an architecture capable of efficiently connecting data and models. However, there is few generic architectures proposed in the literature, without any consensus. The aim here is to define a digital twin generic architecture suitable for all applications, and technology independent. This architecture is based on a typology composed of 10 criteria characterizing various aspects of the digital twin and its interactions with its physical, virtual and human environment. This architecture is part of a 5-step deployment methodology based on a 5C decomposition. At the end of the paper, we address as validation some specific test cases in the literature relating to maintenance applications .