Applying Digital Engineering Digital Twin to Support Ground Vehicle Virtual Experimentation

A digital twin is a virtual model that accurately imitates a physical asset. This can be as complex as an entire vehicle, a subsystem, and down to a small functioning component. The digital twin has a level of fidelity that aligns to the goals of the project team. The usage of a digital twin inside a digital engineering (DE) ecosystem permits architecture and design decisions for optimized product behavior, performance, and interactions. This paper demonstrates a methodology to incorporate the digital twin concept from requirement analysis, low fidelity feature level simulation, rapid prototypes running inside a System Integration Lab, and high fidelity virtual prototypes executing in an entirely virtual environment.