Digital Transformation for Aerospace

Digital Transformation is the strategic transformation of an organization's products, processes, and capabilities, driven and enabled by rapidly advancing and converging digital technologies, to dramatically enhance the organization's performance and efficiency. These advancing digital technologies include software, cloud computing, data management and analytics, artificial intelligence, mobile access, Internet of Things (IoT), and others. Their convergence is producing major transformations across industries - media and entertainment, retail, advertising, publishing, health care, travel, transportation, etc. Through digital transformation, organizations seek to gain or retain their competitive edge by becoming more aware of and responsive to both customer and employee interests, more agile in testing and implementing new approaches, and more innovative and prescient in pioneering the next wave of products and services. Central to the success of digital transformation is the pervasive (and often automated) collection and use of data about everything that impacts success--the organization's infrastructure, processes, activities, competencies, products and services, customers, partners, industry, and so on. Organizations can mine this massive, complex, and often unstructured data to develop accurate insights into how to improve organizational performance and efficiency. An organization may also use this data to build models of systems to refine operations, or to train machine learning algorithms to automate processes, provide recommendations, or enhance customer experiences. The digital technologies listed above are essential to generate, collect, transform, mine, analyze, and utilize this data across the enterprise. NASA is undertaking a digital transformation journey to enhance mission success and impact. NASA is engaging digital transformation to: Accelerate innovation and knowledge growth Support data-informed decisions Achieve more complex missions Enable pervasive collaboration Enhance cost-effectiveness Build a digital-savvy workforce Through this focus area, NASA is seeking to explore and develop technologies that are essential for the Agency's successful digital transformation. Specific innovations being sought in this solicitation are: Model-based enterprise, which seeks to create digital models or twins of NASA's enterprise, to enable decision-making with increased insight and velocity primarily for supporting agency operations and evolving infrastructure needs. Hyper-realistic Extended Reality (XR) real time visualization technologies for Lunar and subsequent Mars Extravehicular Activity (EVA) surface operations and training with extensibility to similar agency needs. Details about these applications of digital transformation technologies are in the respective subtopic descriptions.