Artificial intelligence (AI) systems developer Aerogility will supply Rolls-Royce with its AI-based enterprise digital twin system. The five-year contract will extend across the entire Rolls-Royce value chain, including partners and customers, to provide insights into asset lifecycles and carbon footprint.
Rolls-Royce expects to utilize the Aerogility system to develop highly complex forecasts to inform what it says will be safe and trusted business decisions. The new deal builds on a previous agreement that supplied multiple Rolls-Royce divisions with Aerogility's system to forecast the outcomes of strategic decisions.
Rolls-Royce will run multiple ‘what-if’ scenarios in rapid, largescale simulations of the business. Aerogility says this will enable better decision-making for complex asset lifecycle management by quantifying opportunities to improve the performance of the Rolls-Royce services business.
“Aerogility’s technology offers our teams access to a powerful decision-support tool, ensuring strategic planning and implementation can be made with confidence, enabling us to extend our decision-making capabilities across the business,” says Robin Gibbs, digital capability executive at Rolls-Royce.
On the defense side, Aerogility has supplied Rolls-Royce with its enterprise decision-support software for several years. This approach combines in-depth knowledge of product design and enterprise support with analysis of real operational data, using advanced data analytics to optimize the fleet utilization.
In recent years, AI has captured significant interest across the MRO industry. These systems use an intelligent model of an entire fleet operation, where AI software agents play out the role of aircraft fleets and major systems, plus all the supporting facilities and operational infrastructure, in a realistic future simulation of the business.
EasyJet was an early adopter of Aerogility’s technology in 2017. The low-cost carrier says it used the technology to explore the long-term maintenance planning of its fleet with the capability to not only make a late change to the plan, but simultaneously understand the impact of that decision operationally and economically.
According to Aerogility, its AI-based multi-agent software does not replicate the functions of some of the other popular MRO software products in the market, but rather takes aspects of their data, combines it with input from other sources and generates predictive maintenance forecasts.