Digital twin concept for aircraft components

Digital twins are one way to develop future intelligent systems. Aviation brings along very special circumstances, since the majority of the components do not remain in the first aircraft (A/C) over the life cycle and are constantly changing as they belong to other systems. Due to the high values of these assets, many of them are subjected to a maintenance process and then mounted to another aircraft. In this paper, a digital twin concept is developed for these components. For this purpose, requirements from different areas are derived and merged to the new concept. First, the stakeholders of the aviation maintenance ecosystem are considered. Then the concept of digital twin or digital twin web is explained. In order to enable the identification of the data sets in the digital twin, unique identifiers must be introduced before the specifics of aviation components and their processes are discussed. At the end the new concept is described. The various identifiers, the distributed system and the roles of the stakeholders in the ecosystem are discussed