Thanks to increasingly interconnected and autonomous systems, the world is undergoing digital transformation at unprecedented pace. So we need to design, develop, test and operate systems in increasingly agile, cost-effective, safe and secure ways.
Thales’ ongoing digital transformation initiatives focus on the cultural, business and technology changes required to successfully widen the scope of engineering in the virtual domain, and to secure a future in which the majority of engineering effort is performed through modelling, simulation, digital twinning and synthetics.
In recent years, the evolution of enabling technologies such as high-performance and cloud computing, synthetic data generation and digital stimulators, federated systems, digital twins, data analytics, data visualisation and AI – has enabled increasingly effective virtual engineering approaches.
Our environment digital twin provides a highly detailed virtual representation of a geographical area, supporting infrastructure and target systems operating within that environment. It brings together connectivity, big data, digital trust, simulation and visualisation for engineering activities, and will support simulation, emulation, hardware in the loop, software in the loop, and live, virtual constructive-based scenarios. What’s more, it’s interoperable, scalable and portable, thanks to the use of open standards, and is applicable throughout the engineering lifecycle to provide value in use cases as varied as design optimisation, test and evaluation, and even operations.
With extensive real-world system development and digital/synthetic facilities, our current generation of programmes are acting as Proof of Concepts for hybrid engineering strategies that exploit real and synthetic capabilities in an integrated and complimentary way, which mitigates delivery, cost and quality risks significantly.
Such programmes include the Future Flight Challenge, in which Thales and partners in the Airspace of the Future consortium are developing a digital twin of the National Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) Experimentation Corridor (NBEC). This is a safe, segregated airspace for testing drone infrastructure, and for testing activity for airspace structures and unmanned traffic management (UTM) concepts. The practicalities of the Future Flight Challenge are immense, and require significant experimentation, test and evaluation to combine diverse technological, operational and regulatory approaches to create a safe, coherent and complete aviation enterprise.
The Airspace of the Future Digital Twin turns the concept of a secure integrated digital airspace into a reality.
Rob McGeachy, Head of Innovation for Training and Simulation in the UK
The Airspace of the Future Digital Twin establishes an accurately representative environment in which to operate a variety of commercial drone and air mobility vehicles. This will attract technology capability providers, regulatory innovators and commercial operators to co-create and sustain a next-generation aviation system characterised by high levels of automation, security, safety, connectivity and autonomy.
Phase 2 of the Future Flight Challenge will include demonstration of the Airspace of the Future Digital Twin, and focus on providing situational awareness of the Digital Aviation Research and Technology Centre (DARTeC) at Cranfield University, the co-located NBEC, and surrounding areas. The digital twin will then be used to plan, supervise, de-brief and de-risk the introduction of the Airspace of the Future System of Systems to operational airspace.