The following blog post reviews the article “Unlocking the Promise of Digital Twins: Pairing real-world systems with their digital representations could improve decision-making, but questions remain about reliability and trustworthiness,” authored by Solmaz Barazesh Spence and published by the National Academy of Sciences.
Over the past several years, remarkable advancements in digital twin technologies, which utilize modeling and simulation to create a virtual representation that mirrors its physical counterpart’s structure, context, and behavior, bring us closer to a future where this scenario is a reality. Digital twins, surpassing traditional simulation and modeling, feature bidirectional feedback. Envision it as a continuous back-and-forth conversation between virtual and physical components, promising a new era of decision-making.
“Digital twins have great promise in bringing value across areas of science and technology, including engineering and the natural world,” said Karen Willcox, director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. “There are serious research questions to tackle, and any responsible development of digital twin technologies must maintain an integral focus on establishing and maintaining trust.”
Demand for digital twins to support critical decision-making is growing across many domains. For example, a digital twin of a city’s transportation network can help reduce traffic congestion, predict the effects of adding new routes, and help guide future infrastructure investments. A digital twin of a coastal community can help emergency planners understand how climate change affects storm severity and guide resilience efforts such as building hazard mitigation infrastructure and implementing disaster management strategies.
The responsible implementation of digital twin technologies necessitates a steadfast commitment to establishing trust and credibility, as emphasized in the 2023 report by the National Academies, Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, entitled Foundational Research Gaps and Future Directions for Digital Twins. The study was sponsored by the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
(Source: www.nationalacademies.org/news/2024/06/unlocking-the-promise-of-digital-twins)
© 2024 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
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