Intelligent twins have powerful simulation capabilities, and with your data foundation in place, they will let you reimagine your innovation process. They are, essentially, a low-risk playground to explore new product ideas, strategize for many possible futures, and explore limitless "what-if" scenarios. While the adoption of digital twins is gaining steam in sectors such as energy, manufacturing, healthcare, defense, and logistics, many examples still tend to be more experimental and small in scale. But the capabilities they are demonstrating will only become more valuable when enterprises can tap into multiple twins in fully mirrored environments.
For instance, intelligent twins can completely transform product development. They enable AI-driven generative design, where human workers and AI systems iteratively work together, shrinking design and manufacturing timelines significantly. And they allow enterprises to complete more product testing in simulation, meaning they can put off physical manufacturing for much longer, saving time and money.
And this is precisely what the Air Force has in mind. The service successfully used digital twins to design, prototype, and conduct initial testing on its latest jet trainer aircraft, the eT-7 Red Hawk, thereby avoiding the time and expense of building a prototype. Former Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett even boasted that the plane had flown "thousands of hours before it [took] off," and was "assembled hundreds of times before any metal [was] even cut." The Air Force now intends to use digital twins to develop and test weapons and is building an online “Colosseum” in which vendors can show off their virtual weapons. Col. Garry Haase, head of the Munitions Directorate at the Air Force Research Lab, said AFRL plans to stage regular competition events in the Colosseum, each dealing with a different technology area.
For the Air Force, this isn’t just a new, better way to build and acquire weapons systems. It amounts to a total transformation of the military’s entire approach to modernization, says Will Roper, the Air Force’s recent assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics. Digital twins will play a central role in what Roper is calling his Digital Century Series concept for developing future combat aircraft. The idea of the 'Digital Century Series' is not about building aircraft that are different, but about building aircraft differently," he said. "The key tenet is a new 'holy trinity of technologies that would flip the pace of building new things and the price we pay for them." Those technologies include agile software development; modular, open-systems architecture; and digital engineering, including the use of digital twin technology.
When all aspects of a new weapon system — such as the aircraft design, all the components, the assembly line, the tooling — are digitally modeled, they can be easily optimized. “You can get expensive tooling out if you can find a better substitute. You can change a process from requiring an artisan with years of training to one requiring a lower skill level. The idea is to find a better way of assembling things, and raise the learning curve in the digital space, before you ever build the first aircraft,” Roper said. “The ambition — which I think is completely achievable — is building the first airplane as if it was the hundredth.”