Engineering Design with Digital Thread

Digital Thread is a data-driven architecture that links together information generated from across the product lifecycle. A specific opportunity is to leverage Digital Thread to more efficiently design the next generation of products. This task is a data-driven design and decision problem under uncertainty. This paper explores this problem through three objectives: 1) Provide a mathematical definition of Digital Thread in the context of a specific engineering design problem. 2) Establish the feedback coupling of how information from Digital Thread enters the design problem. 3) Develop a a data-driven design methodology that incorporates information from Digital Thread into the next generation of product designs. The methodology is illustrated through an example design of a structural fiber steered composite component.