Digital Twins for Complex Adaptive Systems

Abstract

“Digitalisation of our critical national infrastructures, such as transportation or telecommunications, has unlocked the ability to monitor and control their operation in software. While this opens many possibilities for improved, safer, and more holistic operation of single or multi-domain systems, it has also increased the complexity and importance of ensuring that these systems are sufficiently validated, resilient, and can be considered “safe enough to try”, especially in the era of generative AI.

Digital twins are virtual representations of target systems, processes, or artefacts that enable exploration of “what-if” scenarios without causing disruption to production systems and providing responses in seconds, instead of years. While seeing increased adoption, the challenge of creating digital twins and connecting them together remains an open research challenge. This challenge is the specific focus of TransiT (transit.ac.uk), the UK’s digital twinning hub exploring transport decarbonisation.

In this talk, i will describe the work that we are doing on how to create digital twins and their federations, as well as the development of ontologies to provide the necessary semantic glue required to achieve general interopability, and the federation of digital twins. "