Tracking Debris and Avoiding Collisions in Space Using Digital Twins Adapted from ISO 23247

What is it about?

One of the greatest challenges facing digital twin adoption in the aerospace industry is a fundamental lack of standardization. As a first step towards remedying this issue, we propose adapting existing digital twin standards (from non-aerospace domains) to aerospace applications. We then demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by adapting a particular standard—ISO 23247, “Digital Twin Framework for Manufacturing”—to on-orbit collision avoidance and space-based debris detection.

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Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Digital twins, which represent real, physical systems (or environments) in a virtual form, have the potential to revolutionize the aerospace industry. Among other things, they can be used to accelerate the design phase of engineering programs, automate processes that are currently done manually, and monitor the health of—and diagnose issues with—aircraft and spacecraft, all while lowering operation and maintenance costs. In spite of the potential benefits, many key players in the aerospace industry still hesitate to buy into digital twins. According to the AIAA Digital Engineering Integration Committee—which includes a wealth of engineers, scientists, and other specialists within the fields of digital and aerospace engineering—one of the greatest obstacles to the widespread adoption of digital twins in aerospace is a lack of standardization. So, we have to ask—how do we begin standardizing digital twin frameworks in aerospace? Our proposal: why not take existing digital twin standards from related domains and adapt them to aerospace engineering? In this paper, we take the recently published ISO 23247 standard, "Digital Twin Framework for Manufacturing," and adapt it for the first time for non-manufacturing aerospace applications. In doing so, we capture the existing process for detecting and avoiding collisions between satellites and other objects in low Earth orbit in, for the first time, a standardized digital twin framework. Using this result, we then develop a brand new, basic digital twin framework for using satellites to detect millions of tiny space debris particles that are too small to be tracked by telescopes on the ground. In the end, our work shows that adapting digital twin standards from other domains to aerospace applications is both reasonable and effective. We hope that this paper will inspire other aerospace and digital engineers to develop new digital twin standards for aerospace, and that these new standards will encourage key players in the industry to see the value of digital engineering and convince them to develop and use digital twins for their air and space applications.

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