SAE AIR7367

The scope of this SAE Aerospace Information Report (AIR) is to describe the considerations for requirements, specifications, and framework of digital thread in the aircraft product life cycle management. This document is not intended to define an overarching rendition of implementation-dependent features around software or architecture. In the aerospace community, the digital thread is a powerful concept to facilitate the tracking, analyzing, and enhancing the performance of an asset across its entire lifecycle. The digital thread constitutes numerous flows of information as a digital representation of events related to product information throughout the product lifecycle. The digital thread provides the data and structure necessary to obtain data from real-world events and align that data with the virtual design objects and their real-time physical transformations over the object lifecycle stages and as the operational state changes. There are three main aspects to the data involved: 1 Operational data collected from physical device sensors and system monitoring the environment interacting with physical devices. 2 Lower-level data that needs to be exchanged between various systems and the interoperability constraints that facilitate these exchanges. 3 Higher level information or meta data that needs to be defined, stored, retrieved, and analyzed throughout the lifetime of the asset to make engineering and business decisions. While there is a lot of work being carried out in areas one and two—i.e., in ensuring that all players in the lower-level data layers work compatibly—there is less work being done in identifying exactly what kinds of data and information that needs to be gathered, stored, and analyzed at higher levels. This SAE Aerospace Information Report (AIR) aims to describe the higher-level requirements, specifications and framework for the digital thread and the benefits that can accrue from the application of digital thread.