Digital Twins as Foundation for Augmented Reality Applications in Aerospace

Augmented reality techniques can be used to support system modeling and industrial operations at different levels, enabling designers and engineers to augment their real environment with relevant virtual content. In aerospace, these techniques are tightly coupled to digital twins. Together, they can enhance scarce operational resources, facilitating skill transfer and knowledge retention. It is possible to define the term digital twin based on conceptual data models as used in model-based system engineering. In this definition, a conceptual data model is used to accompany a product as an unique evolving system model through the whole lifecycle, starting from virtual abstractions and progressing toward a virtual replication of the real-world entity. Throughout the whole lifecycle, digital twins help to analyze or predict system behavior for improving decision-making and avoiding cost-expensive prototyping. In this chapter, we discuss how digital twin representations can leverage on augmented reality approaches and provide an overview of how model-based system engineering can help to maintain information consistency through the different phases of the product lifecycle. In this context, we address different aspects related to the use of augmented reality approaches for digital twins in aerospace, such as overlay precision, interaction, data visualization, and remote collaboration. Our example applications take different phases of the product lifecycle into account, from creation to operation.