Foundational Research Gaps and Future Directions for Digital Twins (2024) / Chapter Skim
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7 Toward Scalable and Sustainable Digital Twins
7 Toward Scalable and Sustainable Digital Twins
Pages 99-113
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From page 99... ...
Bringing complex digital twins to fruition necessitates robust and reliable yet agile and adaptable integration of all these disparate pieces. This chapter discusses crosscutting issues such as evolution and sustainability of the digital twin; translation of digital twin practices between different domains and communities; model and data sharing to advance digital twin methods; and workforce needs and education for digital twin production, maintenance, and use. EVOLUTION AND SUSTAINABILITY OF A DIGITAL TWIN As described in Chapter 2, digital twins build on decades of computational, mathematical, statistical, and data science research within and across disciplines as diverse as biology, engineering, physics, and geosciences.
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The attributes of the bidirectional workflows supported by the digital twin and the attendant resource provisioning required to support timely and reliable decisions are also key considerations for sustaining the digital twin. These workflows, too, may change over time and circumstance, so both formalism and flexibility are required in the design of the digital twin. Existing literature and documented practices focus on the creation and deployment of digital twins; little attention has been given to sustainability and 1 For the purposes of this report, the committee defines life cycle as the "overall process of devel oping, implementing, and retiring ...
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Specific findings, gaps, and recommendations for data are addressed in the upcoming section Translation Between Domains. Scalability of Digital Twin Infrastructure The successful adoption, deployment, and efficient utilization of digital twins at scale requires a holistic approach to an integrated, scalable, and sustainable hardware and software infrastructure. The holistic system-of-systems characteristic of a digital twin presents the challenge that digital twins must seamlessly operate in a heterogeneous and distributed infrastructure to support a broad spectrum of operational environments, ranging from hand-held mobile devices accessing digital twins "on-the-go" to large-scale centralized high-performance computing (HPC)
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. Digital twins necessitate a move away from fragmented components and toward a trusted and secured single hub of assets that captures, integrates, and delivers disparate bidirectional data flows to produce actionable information.
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This blend of domain specificity and commonality can be seen in each of the elements of the digital twin ecosystem. When it comes to the digital twin virtual representation, advancing the models themselves is necessarily domain specific, but advancing the digital twin enablers of hybrid modeling and surrogate modeling embodies shared challenges that crosscut domains.
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From page 104... ...
Finally, verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification (VVUQ) is another area that has some domain-specific needs but represents a significant opportunity to advance digital twin VVUQ methods and practices for digital twins in ways that translate across domains. As stakeholders consider architecting programs that balance these domainspecific needs with cross-domain opportunities, it is important to recognize that different domains have different levels of maturity with respect to the different elements of the digital twin ecosystem.
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• National Science Foundation––Directorate for Technology, Inno vation and Partnerships programs. MODEL AND DATA COLLABORATIONS TO ADVANCE DIGITAL TWIN METHODS While several major models are used within the international climate research community, there is a history of both sharing and coordination of models. Moreover, there is a history of and consistent commitment to data exchange among this international research community that is beneficial to digital twins.
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From page 106... ...
The real-time transmission of data is backed up by a network of archival facilities, such as the National Centers for Environmental Information,4 which archives and makes publicly available more than 700 TB of Earth observations and analyses each month. The global network of atmospheric observations used for weather forecasting is augmented for longer records in the Global Climate Observing System.5 The evolution of the global observing network has been advised by the use of the observations to initialize weather and climate forecasts via data assimilation in which a model of the Earth system (or one of its components) is used to generate an estimate of the current state of the system, which is then optimally combined with the observations to produce an initial condition for a forecast.
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The creation of the human genome demonstrates a successful worldwide cooperative effort that advanced common and ambitious research goals. Another objective in establishing these international interdisciplinary collaborations might be to lay the groundwork for establishing norms and standards for evaluation, protection, and sharing of digital twins. While there are similar examples of community data sets (e.g., Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, Human Microbiome Project, Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory,10 U.S.
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explicitly consider the role for collaboration and coordination with international bodies. PREPARING AN INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKFORCE FOR DIGITAL TWINS While digital twins present opportunity for dramatic improvement in accurate predictions, decision support, and control of highly complex natural and engineered systems, successful adoption of digital twins and their future progress hinge on the appropriate education and training of the workforce.
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. In the context of workforce development for digital twins, the committee identifies three core areas where foundational improvements can have significant impact: interdisciplinary degrees, research training programs, and faculty engagement. Interdisciplinary Degrees Progress in both advancing and adopting digital twins requires interdisciplinary education.
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This training will be dynamic as digital twins mature and will need to occur at various levels, including at community colleges and trade schools (e.g., certificate programs) . There are few examples of successful research training programs for interdisciplinary work.
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Another example is Code Ocean.15 Faculty play a critical role in identifying, developing, and implementing interdisciplinary programs; their support and engagement is essential. KEY GAPS, NEEDS, AND OPPORTUNITIES In Table 7-1, the committee highlights key gaps, needs, and opportunities for building digital twins that are scalable and sustainable.
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From page 112... ...
Frameworks are needed that go beyond existing open science frameworks that largely rely on aggregating de-identified data into publicly accessible repositories. Research Ongoing But Limited Results Existing literature and documented practices focus on the creation and deployment 1 of digital twins; little attention has been given to sustainability and maintenance or life-cycle management of digital twins.
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USGCRP (U.S. Global Change Research Program)
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