The aviation industry is undergoing a profound transformation with the adoption of digital twins that exploit the power of supercomputing to anticipate and solve complex problems, reducing development risks and improving the effectiveness of solutions. We have thus moved from an approach based on the validation of physical prototypes to an entirely digital approach from the early stages of aircraft design.
The most advanced environment in which Leonardo’s Aircraft business area applies these new methodologies is the PC2Lab (Product Capability and Concept Laboratory) in Turin, a multifunctional digital laboratory that, using the computing power of the davinci-1 supercomputer, is able to manage enormous amounts of data and develop virtual prototypes of all the components of a system, which are placed in simulated multi-domain mission scenarios. This approach allows complex operational scenarios to be animated, allowing engineers to test and validate the characteristics and effectiveness of aircraft already in the conception phase, long before they are physically built.
