Impact of Topology Manipulation on Digital Thread Functionality: A Case Study on Aerospace Engineering

The emergence of Industry 4.0 has necessitated the integration of technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) concepts into the production, operation, and processes of industries and institutions. Industry with the growing amount of data generated in facilities, digital models such as digital twin and the digital thread representing the communication between the devices can be leveraged to efficiently execute and monitor the processes. Linking different contributing assets to their counterpart digital twins is one of the main roles of the digital thread. Creating a digital thread for any product or the set of operations to manage a procedure during the life cycle of a product has been a major focus in the last few years. It eliminates a lot of difficulties (such as errors and delays) and optimizes the operations in every stage of designing products, services, and so on. Considering the numerous advantages of implementing the digital thread, there is still space to further improve the technology. Digital thread, as an infrastructure of data flow, can be optimized by mitigating problems such as latency in the communication between the interconnected nodes. This thread of communication between nodes can be shown as a mathematical graph made of vertices and edges so that the set of edges realizes the digital thread concept. Viewing a digital thread as a graph emerges the idea of exploiting well-known graph theory knowledge to figure out the problems of communication. In this paper, a graph representation of the digital thread is analyzed and one candidate scenario for reducing the network distance, which is the average path connecting two network nodes, will be studied as a use case. This approach intends to optimize the performance with latency as the key performance metric, by manipulating network distance as an independent variable.