Rotorcraft Digital Twin: Exploiting On-board Data for Enhancing Sustainment and Operational Availability

Abstract:
Rotorcraft Digital Twin (RDT) is a Digital Transformation initiative to leverage on-board flight data, design data, maintenance records, and advanced analytical models to enhance the current sustainment paradigm, increase availability, reduce life-cycle cost, and to enable optimization of future designs. Many core capabilities have been integrated into RDT, such as load estimation, advanced regime recognition, gross weight estimation, fatigue damage accrual calculations, among others, which leverage a rich body of prior work. Multiple algorithms enable component life extensions, predictive maintenance, selection of the optimal set of assets for a particular mission or deployment to minimize the likelihood of unscheduled maintenance, supporting the Rotorcraft Structural Integrity Program (RSIP) requirements, and feeding field data back into the design process for continuous product improvements. A robust, generic, and reusable suite of algorithms and associated framework has been developed utilizing a common data model where possible. RDT has been developed with a modern cloud-native microservice software architecture which glues together carefully selected Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) components.

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