Persistent IDs: Enhancing the Digital Thread Across the Aerospace and Defense Industry

For decades, aerospace and defense manufacturers have invested in digital engineering, model-based practices, and digital thread initiatives to connect critical product information across the lifecycle. Yet one challenge continues to limit the full potential of these efforts: maintaining traceability and context as data moves between engineering, manufacturing, inspection, quality, and sustainment systems.

That challenge is the focus of the industry-led initiative bringing together aerospace manufacturers, software providers, and manufacturing technology partners to advance a new level of digital continuity across the product lifecycle. The effort is led by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and supported by an ecosystem of technology partners, including PTC.

What are persistent IDs?

Persistent IDs are unique digital identifiers assigned to product features and characteristics within a model-based engineering environment. Unlike traditional identifiers that can be lost or recreated as information moves between systems, PIDs remain associated with a product’s feature throughout its lifecycle.

This allows engineering intent, manufacturing plans, inspection results, quality records, and sustainment data to remain connected even as information flows across multiple organizations, software platforms, and lifecycle stages.

The result is a more resilient and interoperable digital thread that preserves data context and traceability from design through production, delivery, and sustainment.

Why the industry is working together

Modern aerospace and defense programs rely on complex supply chains, diverse software ecosystems, and decades-long product lifecycles. While many organizations have successfully digitized individual processes, maintaining continuity between those processes remains a challenge.

The effort addresses this challenge by establishing a standards-based approach that allows participating systems to reference the same feature or characteristic throughout the product’s lifecycle. Rather than creating another proprietary integration, the initiative is focused on demonstrating interoperable workflows supported by open industry standards and collaboration across the broader ecosystem.

Whether products are manufactured internally or by suppliers, Persistent IDs represent a critical missing link for achieving a continuous digital thread that preserves engineering intent needed to execute downstream processes accurately.

Potential impact across the product lifecycle

The value of Persistent IDs extends well beyond data management.

When data remains connected and traceable across systems, organizations gain the ability to:

• Improve collaboration across engineering, manufacturing, inspection, and quality teams
• Accelerate identification and resolution of manufacturing and quality issues
• Reduce rework, scrap, and production delays by maintaining traceability to engineering intent
• Reduce manual reconciliation and duplicate efforts between functions and systems
• Strengthen digital thread and digital twin initiatives with more trusted lifecycle data
• Enable broader use of analytics and AI on trusted, traceable information sets

One of the current focus areas demonstrates how Persistent IDs can support rework and repair workflows by linking design requirements, 3D Models, manufacturing data, inspection results, engineering dispositions, and repair validations through a common digital reference. Maintaining that traceability can help teams identify issues faster, understand the engineering context behind a nonconformance, and execute rework with greater confidence.

Why this matters to aerospace and defense

For aerospace and defense organizations, feature-level digital continuity can directly accelerate product delivery by giving every function a shared, traceable understanding of engineering intent. When engineering, manufacturing, inspection, quality, and sustainment teams can reference the same product feature across systems, they spend less time reconciling disconnected data and more time collaborating on decisions. As programs become more complex and production demands increase, maintaining trusted connections between engineering intent and downstream execution becomes increasingly important.

PTC has long believed that the future of engineering depends on connecting information across people, processes, and systems. Persistent IDs represent an important step toward making that vision a reality across the aerospace and defense ecosystem.

PTC is working alongside industry leaders to help advance standards-based approaches for interoperability, traceability, and digital continuity. The initiative aligns closely with PTC's broader commitment to model-based engineering, digital thread enablement, lifecycle management, and connecting engineering information with downstream manufacturing and service processes.

Looking ahead

The effort demonstrates what is possible when industry leaders collaborate to solve shared challenges. By creating a common framework for maintaining product context and traceability across organizations and technologies, Persistent IDs have the potential to strengthen digital thread connectivity, improve operational effectiveness, and support the next generation of model-based engineering initiatives.

As adoption expands and standards mature, Persistent IDs could become a foundational capability for maintaining engineering intent across the product lifecycle. The added clarity that PIDs provide supports faster response to engineering changes, quicker resolution of manufacturing and quality issues, and more confident movement of products through production.