A study on co-simulation digital twin with MATLAB and AirSim for future advanced air mobility

The exponential growth in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operations highlights the need for reliable and efficient airspace management. Ensuring the integrity and reliability of UAV Traffic Management (UTM) systems requires extensive testing, verification and validation. Overcoming these challenges is essential to guarantee that UAVs can be successfully integrated into operational airspace while maintaining the highest standards of safety and effectiveness. The development and improvement of virtual environment testing capabilities are critical to the advancement and rapid deployment of UTM services; however, building a high-fidelity digital environment that enables the development, verification and validation of UTM solutions in a compliant, scalable and sustainable manner remains demanding. By integrating MATLAB, Simulink, AirSim, Unreal Engine and Cesium, this study aims to extend the performance and functionality of a Digital Twin (DT) system. This integration leverages the sophisticated modelling capabilities of MATLAB and the advanced 3-dimensional (3D) simulation capabilities of AirSim. It also aligns with emerging trends in the aerospace sector, including autonomous flight and advanced sensing technologies. Firstly, co-simulation is explored as a potential technique to overcome the limitations of individual simulation software available on the market. The general principles are then applied to define and model a communication interface between the software selected to build the DT ecosystem. This interface is then evaluated by proposing practical and achievable test cases. Only after validating the proposed co-simulation framework, further experiments are introduced aiming at improving the vehicle and sensor model performance to obtain more accurate synthetic data. A series of experiments of increasing difficulty is proposed, starting from co-simulating a single sensor (GNSS, INS, LIDAR and camera) up to co-simulating the entire aircraft system for the development of intelligent algorithms such as waypoint following and collision avoidance. Ultimately, this research contributes to the practical application of co-simulation, providing insight into its capabilities and potential influence on the advancement of autonomous aircraft and DT systems.