Rolls-Royce’s experience of enterprise digital twins to model sustainability
Andy Eady, sustainability executive at Rolls-Royce, leads the sustainability elements of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) and Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), and has worked with AI company Aerogility since 2020 to identify opportunities to model the business’ sustainability initiatives. Here he explains how Aerogility and Rolls Royce are progressing in this area.
As a leading power systems provider, Rolls-Royce has a fundamental role in addressing the environmental and societal challenges that the world faces. We are determined to use our position, capabilities and expertise as a global power group to help create a resilient, inclusive, net zero carbon future and accelerate the decarbonisation of the sectors we serve. One of the key enablers for realising our sustainability ambitions will be the use of digital tools to monitor and reduce our environmental impact through the life of our products.
Aerogility’s AI-based enterprise digital twin solution, with its repeatable agent-based framework, provided a natural foundation for introducing additional functionality that would allow us to model the environmental dimension and explore how we might sustain operations in a climate changed world.
Aerogility enables us to model the environmental impact of our products in service and various elements of the support enterprise, such as the energy consumption at sites like maintenance facilities, inventory stores, or even general office blocks. We use the solution to test different scenarios and plot potential routes to net zero. This approach also allows us to optimise life costs while maintaining asset availability.
Sustainability in defence
With sustainability in defence aerospace a relatively new topic, there isn’t a rulebook or framework that you can look up and find all the answers. Aerogility offers real value here, providing us with a clear visual illustration of our business decisions over a long period of time, which really brings the sustainability impact to life at a time when there isn’t an established precedent for gaining insights in this area. We can zoom into carbon, for instance, and assess how we might maintain our existing decarbonisation efforts even at time of surge operations.
Alternatively, we can look at energy and assess whether our synthetic fuel manufacturing output is sufficient to deal with a surge event in 2040. Or we could identify the optimal global location for our inventory, balancing costs, logistical considerations and the carbon impact.
A real breakthrough was gaining the ability to start modelling our energy decisions and the impact of these on our operations. One example is our exploration of how we might approach the manufacturing of synthetic fuel for a future sustainable air force. We’re able to explore constraints around energy supply affecting fuel output, constraints around the amount of fuel storage facilities and disruptions to distribution routes, as well as looking at the effect of extreme weather across this chain.
This exploration is powerful and highlights the complexity of a modern defence aerospace enterprise, while also incorporating the importance of understanding emerging risk relating to the effects of climate change. We can interrogate what might happen if a storage facility floods, for instance, or if a facility is affected by a forest fire. Understanding how to de-risk this situation is possible thanks to Aerogility.
Ultimately, having Aerogility in place means we’re able to ask the right questions and explore meaningful answers, cutting through the ambiguity and uncertainty that might otherwise exist as a large, complex organisation operating in a fast-changing landscape.
Aerogility and Rolls Royce have announced a further five-year enterprise-wide contract. This will build on the existing relationship across multiple divisions, which has already resulted in two awards, the Defence President’s Award and the Sir Frank Whittle Medal.
