New Report Urges Multiagency Action to Support Potentially Transformative Digital Twins Research

Federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, should develop new crosscutting programs to advance the mathematical, statistical, and computational foundations underlying digital twin technologies, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Digital twins hold immense potential to accelerate scientific discovery, drive improvements in climate sciences, and revolutionize health care, manufacturing, and other sectors, but an integrated agenda is needed to harmonize research across sectors and focus efforts on realistic applications. 

“Digital twins have great promise in bringing value across areas of science and technology, including engineering, the natural world, and medicine. Our report makes clear that there is a real opportunity here to bring together domains and disciplines in new, valuable ways, but to achieve that value requires investment in interdisciplinary foundations,” said Karen Willcox, director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, and chair of the committee that wrote the report. “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.” 

A digital twin uses modeling and simulation to create a virtual representation that mimics the structure, context, and behavior of a physical counterpart. The report sets down a cohesive definition for the term “digital twin,” emphasizing that in addition to modeling and simulation, there should also be bidirectional interaction between the virtual and physical, forming a feedback loop that allows the digital twin to take in data from the physical counterpart and update itself. The twin should have predictive capability and inform decision-making for the physical counterpart. Such decisions may be fully automated, comprise recommendations to inform a human’s decision, or fall somewhere in between. 

Establishing trust in digital twins is a foundational need, and the report says that it is critical that verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification ― processes to determine whether a computer program correctly solves the equations of the mathematical model, to determine the degree to which the model is an accurate representation of the real world, and to quantify uncertainties within the model’s calculations ― be deeply embedded in the technologies from design to deployment.  

The report says research into digital twins could translate into improved decision-making in biomedical settings, enhanced capabilities for making weather forecasts and simulating climate variability and change, and more efficient operations and production strategies. Advances in digital twins could also open up new avenues for scientific and industrial growth and innovation. 

For example:

• A digital twin of a cancer patient’s tumor could inform clinical decisions and treatments. 
• Sensors in an aircraft could feed information to a digital twin that optimizes fuel efficiency, assesses actual emissions reductions, and provides a finer estimate of wear and tear on parts. 
• A “whole Earth system” digital twin, taking in models of atmospheric, oceanic, terrestrial, and cryospheric physics, could enable insights into extreme weather events and temperature change, and support emergency preparedness efforts and policy changes.  

Digital twins should be fit for purpose for a given task. However, as more advanced virtual models achieve greater fidelity to the physical counterpart, computational and data storage and analysis requirements also increase. In some cases, potential uses of digital twins are currently stymied by a lack of computational resources. The report recommends federal agencies create mechanisms to provide researchers with computational resources to advance the foundations and applications of digital twins. It also notes that advancing mathematical theory and creating algorithms that reduce computational requirements are important complements to increased computing resources. 

As repositories that aggregate sensitive information, digital twins are vulnerable to data breaches, both accidental and malicious, the report says. A digital twin in a medical setting could contain a patient’s entire health history and be identifiable even if the data is anonymized, for example. Issues of privacy, data ownership, and liability are therefore challenges that must be resolved in order to responsibly develop and scale digital twins to more applications. Digital twins can also present more considerable security risks for the physical counterpart, such as when they are tightly integrated into the workings of an aircraft. Safeguarding digital twins will require a higher level of cybersecurity considerations than has previously been incorporated. 

The report outlines a number of other ways federal agencies and other organizations can play important roles in the advancement of the digital twin ecosystem, including that agencies should: 

• Identify areas where collaborating with industry would help advance research relevant to their mission ― for example, the Department of Energy could initially work with partners on energy infrastructure security and improved emergency preparedness. 
• Conduct assessments of data and model sustainment needs for their major use cases, to ensure that digital twins can be sustained and maintained beyond their initial creation. 
• Help advance the interdisciplinary skills of the current and future workforce through entities such as federally funded research and development centers, institutes, and interdisciplinary research programs that incorporate training, and by seeding discussions across industry and academic sectors to explore the creation of interdisciplinary degrees. 

The Oden Institute, which fosters interdisciplinary research, is uniquely positioned to collaborate on digital twin technologies and has a number of ongoing research initiatives already underway, a few of which are highlighted below:

• With Digital Twins of Brain Tumors, Computational Scientists are Personalizing Cancer Care, highlights a collaboration between aerospace engineers and oncology experts, led by Thomas Yankeelov and Karen Willcox. Their recent paper shows how methods developed for digital twins in aerospace engineering can be used for high-grade glioma patients undergoing radiotherapy.
• Multifaceted Mathematics Integrated Capability Center (MMICC) on Multifaceted Mathematics for Predictive Digital Twins (M2dt), is a collaborative research project with the Department of Energy M2Dt, led by Omar Ghattas and Karen Willcox, along with experts from MIT and DOE National Laboratories: Argonne, Brookhaven, and Sandia, respectively.
• Researchers to Develop Digital Twin Platform for Enhanced Storm Mitigation: through a grant with the Department of Energy (DOE), Clint Dawson and Tan Bui-Thanh are working on interdisciplinary research to develop a computational “digital twin” framework that bridges the gap between multi-physics simulations and knowledge discovery through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, called MuSiKAL.

 

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, engineering, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.  

The study — undertaken by the Committee on Foundational Research Gaps and Future Directions for Digital Twins — was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation.  

Contact:

Josh Blatt, Media Relations Officer, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Office of News and Public Information
202-334-2138; email news@nas.edu 

Adapted from the NAS press release.