The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), and the Americas Regional Steering Committee of the International Association for the Engineering Modelling, Analysis and Simulation Community (NAFEMS) have released an implementation paper, “Digital Twin: Reference Model, Realizations & Recommendations,” to advance the use of Digital Twins across the aerospace industry.
Digital Twins are continuously developed across a wide number of applications and industries. The objective of this paper, which has also been developed by members from academia, industry, and government is four-fold:
1. To present a generic reference model for describing how Digital Twins integrate with the broader digital enterprise and for informing broader benefit realizations from Digital Twins in a consistent and scalable way;
2. To highlight a cross section of real and tangible Digital Twin case studies that show realization progress and how each example can be represented by the proposed generic reference model;
3. To provide Aerospace Industry recommendations for what academia, industry and government can do together to accelerate realization of value from Digital Twin technology; and
4. To propose specific next steps toward Digital Twin implementation of the noted recommendations through the establishment of an appropriate Aerospace Digital Transformation Consortium (ADTC) to launch an initial pathfinder effort on Joint All Domain Command & Control (JADC2).
This paper is intended for practitioners interested in the development and implementation of Digital Twins as a means to realize value.
