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Highway asset management requires capturing the highway's status. However, the onsite survey of the highway is very costly and time-consuming. This paper presents a novel approach for creating the digital twin of a highway using map data. The digital twin consists of primary highway components, including horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, cross-section, lanes and central reserves. It follows the engineering representation of a highway, which has excellent potential for further application in the field. The proposed approach was tested in a section of the A1(M) motorway in the UK. It requires minimum human input and has very high accuracy. Despite many outliers in the collected map data, the average vertical deviation per square metre between the surface of the generated digital twin and the actual data was at the centimetre level. • A systematic approach is proposed for making the digital twin of a highway based on map data and engineering expertise. • Spatial data for creating the digital twin can be extracted from low-resolution online map data using the proposed method. • An algorithm is developed to fit the horizontal and vertical alignment of a highway. • Outliers in the spatial data of a highway can be identified and removed using the proposed method. • Cross-sections and the overall digital twin of a highway are generated considering various types of highway components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]