Important social, technical and institutional issues must be addressed if the full potential of digital twin technologies is to be realised, according to a new white paper published today (Thursday 18 May) by The Alan Turing Institute’s AI for science and government programme (ASG).
Digital twins are virtual representations of physical objects and could help researchers, industry and policymakers to tackle pressing challenges such as decarbonisation and infectious diseases.
They can be used to simulate real-life situations and events to see what might happen if we were to make certain adjustments in real life, offering insights and helping people make decisions.
Digital twins can take the form of a single structure, like that of the world’s first 3D printed steel bridge, a system, like a transportation network, or an ecosystem – a combinations of multiple types of interconnected digital twins, such as a representation of the national health system.
The authors say that by creating an ecosystem of these digital twins, greater progress can be made towards tackling some of the most important global challenges including future pandemics and climate change.
They make three key recommendations to address the existing issues:
Elevate cross-disciplinary activities and spaces for digital twins to create opportunities for sparking new ideas and connections, sharing tools and methods and fostering collaboration.
Invest in open infrastructure, with a focus on data and technical standards to ensure that research developments are available for use by others working on similar problems in academia, government or industry.
Prioritise tools for building trust in and understanding of digital twins to anticipate and address potential concerns relating to bias or privacy infringement.
These recommendations will also help to inform the new Turing Research and Innovation Cluster in digital twins which launched earlier this year and aims to provide open and reproducible computational and social tools for digital twin development.
Professor Mark Birkin, paper author and Programme Director for Urban Analytics, said: “Building ecosystems of digital twins can provide invaluable insights for complex global challenges. This paper sets out important recommendations to enable the creation of vital digital twins ecosystems so that we can build robust technology that empowers researchers, engineers, and decision makers to understand and tackle large scale challenges.”
Professor Mark Girolami, Chief Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute, said: “Digital twins can help us to develop crucial capability for understanding and managing complex systems, like transportation and healthcare. With the right investment and collaboration opportunities, creating an ecosystem of digital twins could empower researchers, industry and policymakers to tackle some of the biggest and most complex challenges facing our planet today.”