Digital twins for aircraft maintenance and operation: A systematic literature review and an IoT-enabled modular architecture

Thanks to the rapid growth of the Industry 4.0 domain and the innovations brought by the Internet of Things paradigm, Digital Twins (DT) are increasingly gaining momentum in our society and various companies are moving towards their adoption in many application areas. One of them is the aerospace sector which has started to take advantage of their innovative services to enhance workers’ daily duties. Although different works already proposed solutions to apply the Digital Twin to the industrial domain, the airspace area has not yet completely benefited from its advantages. Digital Twins carve out an important role in the entire aircraft lifecycle management, in particular they provide value in the maintenance process by gathering status information for optimizing aircraft operations. This article aims to comprehensively analyze, by applying the systematic mapping method, the current state of the art on Digital Twin technology applied to aircraft operation and maintenance. The results give an overview about the innovations that the Digital Twins can bring in the specific current state of the art, by highlighting the modeling approach used for building the DT, and the most important extracted common information related to the most frequently adopted tools and the covered subsystems. As a further important contribution to the research community, this work provides a comprehensive modular architecture that acts as a summarizing artifact able to serve all the analyzed works and discusses the open issues by pointing out some interesting research directions, that could lead to new and interesting future works and collaborations.