Road infrastructure and its maintenance management are crucial. Practical challenges of pavement maintenance often include time-consuming manual methods, data collection limitations, and reliance on empirical performance modelling. The adoption of sophisticated predictive and intelligent pavement systems with digital twins (DTs) would be useful to enable smart management strategies. DTs of road infrastructure are virtual counterparts of physical road assets. The literature review in current research revealed that employing DTs for pavement management is still in the early stages in many practices. Simulation is a key component of DT functionality, and mechanistic finite element (FE) simulation has emerged as a strategic tool for flexible pavement mechanistic modelling. Although the FE simulation has been extensively used for flexible pavement analysis, their integration for the digital twin framework in pavement management is still not well understood. Therefore, this review paper focused on exploring the potential of FE simulation in DT implementation for pavement infrastructure management purposes. The literature review reported in this paper is focused on the current state and maturity of FE simulation, including the used mechanistic models, sources and parameters of material behaviour, incorporation of material properties in FE simulators, validation of results, and integrated surrogate modelling trends. The exploration is mainly on the potential use of FE simulation in the context of DT implementation for flexible pavements of road infrastructure. Expectedly, the findings of this study have beneficial implications and perspectives for the effective implementation of DTs in pavement infrastructure management.