The Digital Risk Twin - Enabling Model-based RAMS

While the definition of a Digital Twin (DT) is provided within recent literature, each DT should be designed to meet the specific requirements of the user. As RAMS is focused on the identification, understanding and mitigation of technical risk in a system, a RAMS engineer requires a DT that can autonomously establish the potential dependencies and impacts of functional and physical failures on a system, and auto-generate various analyses to identify the appropriate mitigation approach. The concept of a Digital Risk Twin (DRT) described in this paper should uses an integrated and inter-related set of information about the system, autonomously reflecting changes across analyses that utilize causal simulation to understand potential risks and map their dependencies. This definition has been examined thoroughly from the original literature for Digital Twins, through an examination of core system safety/risk assessment practices demonstrated in RAMS and finally arrives at the main point of the definition and key aspects of a Digital Risk Twin (DRT). As the DRT digitizes the RAMS process across each stage of the Product Lifecycle, it is important that it offers common DT features such as integration, visualization, and simulation. The DRT will also implicitly digitize the engineering domain knowledge utilized in the design process ('Digital Domain Knowledge'), providing a persistent context for analysis and design decisions, and so requires a framework of automated data management, maintaining traceability between activities and decisions made in relation to identified risks.