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Digital Twins for the Real World

Digital Urban Brabant: Making (common) sense of urban digital twins.

A Digital Twin of the Trondheim Fjord for Environmental Monitoring : A Pilot Case

Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTO) are a rapidly emerging topic that has attracted significant interest from scientists in recent years. The initiative, strongly driven by the EU, aims to create a digital replica of the ocean to better understand and manage marine environments. The Iliad project, funded under the EU Green Deal call, is developing a framework to support multiple interoperable DTO using a federated systems-of-systems approach across various fields of applications and ocean areas, called pilots. This paper presents the results of a Water Quality DTO pilot located in the Trondheim fjord in Norway. This paper details the building blocks of DTO, specific to this environmental monitoring pilot. A crucial aspect of any DTO is data, which can be sourced internally, externally, or through a hybrid approach utilizing both. To realistically twin ocean processes, the Water Quality pilot acquires data from both surface and benthic observatories, as well as from mobile sensor platforms for on-demand data collection. Data ingested into an InfluxDB are made available to users via an API or an interface for interacting with the DTO and setting up alerts or events to support ’what-if’ scenarios. Grafana, an interactive visualization application, is used to visualize and interact with not only time-series data but also more complex data such as video streams, maps, and embedded applications. An additional visualization approach leverages game technology based on Unity and Cesium, utilizing their advanced rendering capabilities and physical computations to integrate and dynamically render real-time data from the pilot and diverse sources. This paper includes two case studies that illustrate the use of particle sensors to detect microplastics and monitor algae blooms in the fjord. Numerical models for particle fate and transport, OpenDrift and DREAM, are used to forecast the evolution of these events, simulating the distribution of observed plankton and microplastics during the forecasting period.

Iliad Digital Twins of the Ocean: an innovative approach to Marine Data Systems or: How we build a digital ocean twin with our ocean observatory.

An AI-based Digital Twin Case Study in the MRO Sector

In this work, the concept of an Artificial Intelligence-based (AI) Digital Twin (DT) of an aircraft system is introduced, with the goal to improve the corresponding MRO Operations. More specifically, the current study aims to obtaining knowledge on the optimal placement of sensors in an ideal Power Electronics Cooling System (PECS) of a modern airliner, aiming to improve input data as a basis for an AI-based DT. The three main fluid parameters to be measured directly or indirectly at various physical locations at the PECS are mass flow rate, temperature and static pressure. The physics-based model can then be combined with a Machine Learning (ML) model, such as a Random Forest (RF), with a multitude of decision trees. Following, the AI system determines whether the PECS operations is considered normal, aiming to optimize the performance of the system and to maximize the Useful Remaining Life (URL). The suggested AI-DT approach is based both on data-driven and physics-based models, an approach which results in increased reliability and availability, reducing possible Aircraft on Ground (AOG) events. Subsequently, the enhanced prediction capability results in the optimization of the maintenance processes and in reduced operational costs.

Digital Sustainability Practices: a Research Agenda

Expectations are high for digital technologies to address sustainability related challenges. While research into such applications and the twin transformation is growing rapidly, insights in the actual daily practices of digital sustainability within organizations is lacking. This is problematic as the contributions of digital tools to sustainability goals gain shape in organizational practices. To bridge this gap, we develop a theoretical perspective on digital sustainability practices based on practice theory, with an emphasis on the concept of sociomateriality. We argue that connecting meanings related to sustainability with digital technologies is essential to establish beneficial practices. Next, we contend that the meaning of sustainability is contextspecific, which calls for a local meaning making process. Based on our theoretical exploration we develop an empirical research agenda.