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The Air Force Research Laboratory’s “Digital Hangar,” a concept created by Dr. Rick Graves, an Aerospace Research Engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Design & Analysis Branch, part of AFRL’s Aerospace Systems Directorate, is a virtual repository containing digital surrogates of aerospace systems that have been gated through rigorous validation and verification processes.

Creation and curation of the Digital Hangar is part of a Department of Defense Digital Engineering initiative that began in June 2018, with the publication of a Digital Engineering Strategy that explains how DOD hopes to transform how the services design, develop, deliver, operate, and sustain systems. To read the strategy, visit https://www.acq.osd.mil/se/initiatives/init_de.html.

The strategy defines digital engineering as an integrated digital approach that uses authoritative sources of system data and models as a continuum across disciplines to support lifecycle activities from concept through disposal.

AFRL’s Digital Hangar continues to be developed and will eventually house high-value design information for digital representations of Air Force aerospace systems that will inform decision-making within AFRL and other stakeholder organizations.

“We want to know what types of information we should be generating and using to make decisions during early design phases because that’s where a lot of the costs for an aircraft get locked in. We want to know what types of information we should be gathering over the life cycle of the airplane. The idea is to identify what data is worth keeping, and reuse that data,” said Graves.

Digital Hangar is a trademark of the United States Air Force.

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