Conference: NSF Workshop on Crosscutting Research Needs for Digital Twins

This two-day workshop will identify research needs for digital twins. A digital twin is a set of digital constructs that mimic the structure, context, and behavior of a physical system. Digital twins are coupled to their physical counterparts; they are characterized by a dynamic, continual, two-way flow of information between the digital representation and the physical counterpart. Data streaming from the physical system are integrated into the digital representation to reduce uncertainties and improve accuracy. The digital representation may in turn be used to control the physical system, optimize data acquisition, and prove decision support. Digital twins must execute rapidly enough to support decisions and control in time scales that are relevant to the physical system and must manage and quantify uncertainties. Of particular note is the bi-directional interaction between the virtual and the physical, which is central to distinguishing a digital twin from a conventional simulation. This bi-directional interaction brings many new challenges to modeling, data curation, and decision-making. The workshop will bring together a diverse community of stakeholders to identify research gaps common across application domains and that may benefit from crosscutting interdisciplinary research efforts. The technical program is organized around four methodological themes: (1) Models; (2) Data; (3) Decisions; and (4) Verification, Validation & Uncertainty Quantification. To ensure crosscutting outcomes, these themes will be explored across four application domains: (1) Engineering, Materials & Manufacturing; (2) Smart Cities; (3) Biomedicine & Health; and (4) Climate, Natural Hazards & Environmental Sciences. Workshop speakers will be asked to identify barriers and enablers for achieving scalable digital twins in the four methodological themes, giving concrete examples drawn from the application domains. These barriers and enablers will be collected and organized during interactive workshop sessions. The objective is to identify, for each of the methodological themes, a “top-five” list of crosscutting barriers and a “top-five” list of potential crosscutting enablers, supported with concrete examples from the application domains. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.