Human Digital Twins for Quality Assurance

Quality assurance programs in the manufacturing sector have a traditional foundation built upon human dependency. While some special inspection equipment, tools, or processes may exist, the common denominator between the performance of audits, evaluation of performance and process capability, supply chain management, and execution of inspection, is in fact human labor. According to some studies in the manufacturing sector, as much as 80 percent of all quality assessments are made subjectively by humans. With such reliance on human performance, quality organizations become driven by human labor cost, and due to finite budgets for manpower, therefore constrain the reach and frequency of quality assurance activities based on what is affordable.

Recent global trends with Industry 4.0, which sought to automate processes and eliminate humans from the equation, have shown that human presence is a critical enabler for certain types of work such as quality assurance. The expectations, variation, and potential failure modes are vast and too complicated for full automation of all quality assurance activities. Based on this understanding a new focus on Industry 5.0 has emerged which aims to keep the human centered in the process and build their capability of performance through digital and technological teaming. By enabling the human quality assurance practitioner to utilize and rely on technology for certain things, then their time and attention can be focused on other things simultaneously that are better suited for humans. This approach packs more quality assurance activities into the same hourly labor cost than a focus solely based on the human alone.

This abstract proposes a cutting-edge approach that combines human tradecraft, Mixed Reality (MR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Digital Twin technologies to provide an immersive and hands-on quality assurance platform tailored specifically for the enhancement of effectiveness of quality assurance practices in aerospace.