New Digitalisation Processes and Digital Twins for Aerospace Engineering.

The UK Industrial Strategy has identified digitalisation as a key priority area that will completely transform the future engineering-manufacturing landscape with Industry-4.0 concepts being crucial enablers to this strategy.

The project focuses on researching novel Industry-4.0 concepts for future aircraft design and manufacturing processes including digital twins, augmented/virtual reality, deep/machine learning technologies and big data analytics. These technologies are powerful solutions that look set to transform industry productivity across the complete lifecycle by optimising products, their manufacturing processes and future supply chains. Other exciting technologies to be considered include new information solutions such as single source of truth and blockchain technologies to provide improved traceability and certification compliance across the lifecycle. The human factors aspect of digitalisation is another area of great interest as engineering moves towards ever closer to greater use of model-based engineering methods and virtualisation.