'Interaction Twin in the Middle': A distributed digital twin architecture to model team interactions and dynamics for deep space missions

Abstract

NASA's Moon to Mars campaign emphasizes the need for crews and habitat systems to operate with increasing autonomy as communication delays with Earth grow beyond five minutes. The digital twin framework has emerged as a promising solution to monitor, diagnose, predict, and optimize space systems, but prior aerospace applications have largely centered on system autonomy rather than crew autonomy. As a result, current approaches under-represent the interaction dynamics needed by mission control to continuously evolve procedure and accomplish mission objectives. This work introduces an Interaction Digital Twin (IDT) framework that twins the interactions between humans and systems rather than focusing only on individual entities. Built on a distributed digital twin architecture with bidirectional information flow, the framework integrates three complementary types of twins: Digital Twins for habitat systems, Human Digital Twins (HDTs) for individual crew members, and Interaction Digital Twins that capture emergent phenomena such as team cohesion, trust calibration, coordination, and adaptive autonomy. Twinning the interactions moves aspects of command and control on-board, giving crew mission-control-like capabilities even during periods of communication delay. We apply the framework to an Artemis Phase II mission scenario, demonstrating how interaction-level twinning extends system-level modeling to support cognitive workload management, information sharing, and human–autonomy teaming. By elevating interactions to first-class, inference-capable elements within the digital twin architecture, this framework bridges the gap between technical system models and the human teaming constructs essential for self-sufficient deep space exploration.