The adoption of digital technologies in manufacturing enables intelligent dynamic control approaches, at the cost of increased design complexity. In this paper, ontologies and delta-lenses are exploited to enable multi-scale models of a manufacturing system to map digital models at different scales and let data flow according to the level of fidelity. A workflow is designed to assess the capability of models with a lower level of details to approximate the behaviour of the original system, through the application of a hybrid delta-lens. The approach is illustrated with a user case and applied to an industrial case, aiming at deciding the positions of sensors in an assembly line. © 2021 The Authors