Abstract: The marine engineering is transforming from the traditional industrialization to the intelligent development direction. Dynamic cables are subjected to the challenge that it is difficult to obtain the real-time cross-sectional stress distribution, and the in-service safety cannot be effectively guaranteed. In this paper, digital twin technology for safety operation and maintenance of marine dynamic cables is proposed. The model is composed of a physical cable, a virtual-reality interaction model of cable, and a digital twin model. Firstly, limited inclination values are substituted into the dynamic cable configuration reconstruction algorithm to obtain the axial force and bending moment. Then, the cable are discretized into several sub-segments. The axial forces and bending moments at both cross-sectional ends are inputted into the stress reconstruction algorithm as boundary conditions, to achieve the real-time monitoring of cable cross-sectional stress distributions. Moreover, the digital twin model is divided into 10 000 segments, and the safety conditions of the global cable can be accurately mapped with 3 inclination sensors. The feasibility of the proposed model is verified by experimental and numerical simulation methods, the maximum reconstruction errors of cross-sectional axial and contact stresses under severe sea state are 13.03 MPa and 22.18 MPa, with an average relative reconstruction error of 2.88%, and a computational time of 2.93 s. The results show that the proposed model exhibits good accuracy and real-time performance in the safe operation and maintenance of dynamic cables.