Discussing Digital Twins - Computerphile

Digital Twin - a new buzz word or a useful piece of technology? We asked Dr Steffen Zschaler, Reader in Computer Science at Kings College London.

#ComputerScience #DigitalTwin #CS #computing

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[wellurban]

The concept makes sense for things like industrial processes and aerospace, where the simulation is based on well-known physical laws, but it’s increasingly being applied to social systems. Once you expect your model of human behaviour to be a perfect simulation without taking account of culture, collective organisation and the like, you really need to expect the predictions to have massive error ranges. But far too often a senior executive will leap onto the buzzword and, as with “AI”, expect “Digital Twin” to be a box in a diagram that might as well say “and then a miracle happens”.

[letsgocamping]

It is something we are working on within electricity distribution, but I have never heard it referred to as a digital twin. We already have the SCADA and control system, we also have offline planning tools. By creating the digital twin we will be able to experiment with reinforcement and network configuration. And use it to drive investment decisions.

[steubens]

in medical devices, co-simulation often happens on the device. the software that runs the procedure and a model run together and the fault codes come from them not matching. the hardware and software can be really complex because you're making a different assertion, that it won't diverge from the model. the model can be developed and partially validated by surgeons and stuff before the instrument even exists

[duncanw]

I don't know much about this field directly, but a lot of the terms he's using remind me of the work of theoretical biologist Robert Rosen on the modeling relation and anticipatory behavior. In particular, the diagrams he's drawing, the word "effector, " the notion that models are necessarily lossy...

[mully]

You should make a video on Kalman filtering, its a related topic!

[kellymoses]

Digital twins are an advanced form of closed loop control

[Yupppi]

So digital twin is a subset of IoT, another extremely hand wavey buzz word that just means having a controlling interface to some application of mechanical engineering?

[endofsilence]

Very interesting, but you mostly focused on the sensors and mostly left out the actuators/effectors; would love to learn more!

[skyscraperfan]

Sometimes they build digital twins of huge structures like an airport. I wonder how much it costs too simulate every stone and every cable. It would still have saved the Berlin Airport a lot of money though. The digital twin would have shown that the escalators are too short for example.

[tomoki-vo]

suggestion:the wizard "Gerald Jay sussman" sussman and low resources computing

[bennytam]

All the examples he provided is just data pipeline with data analytics & modelling. And modelling allows you to do what he called what-if analysis which is not unique in Digital Twin. Don't forget building such a huge software system requires maintenance :)

[OcteractSG]

Sensors can be difficult thing to do right because their calibration can drift off course. Now you need people to check and calibrate the sensors, and they need some kind of standard or other testing equipment to calibrate to. And then you also have to figure out what to do with the poor data from any sensors that have drifted off from reality prior to calibration.

[bengoodwin]

This sounds like a great idea for mechanical systems, and horrible for anything imvolving humans managing other humans. I can't imagine anyone being capable of using such a system well for that, especially not someone who would typically be in a position to have access to such a system in order to attempt to do so.

[Astaghfirullah-]

Simulation or decision model with a stream of real-time data and ability to do what-if analysts

[veggiet]

I wonder if this would be good for people who have rare medical conditions: I know someone who has a fairly common birth deformity but it is much more extreme and doctors don't often want to treat it. I doubt many people with this extreme of a condition survive into adulthood... So it'd be interesting to simulate a set of human bodies and then give it these extreme conditions in order to create what amounts to a larger sample size. Is it possible to simulate humans or biological systems at a level that this would be helpful?

[w]

I love how 2001 a space odyssey already mentions digital twins in 1968

[lennywintfeld]

Could a real-world system and its digital twin be encapsulated with another "external" digital twin applied to it? Would such an architecture add any value or utility, or is it turtles all the way down from there?

[philroo]

Uggh, my employer has to jump on every hype train so we've developed a digital twin. Except our model is just a 3d representation you have to walk round to see the same sensor readouts that are normally shown on a scada/hmi 🤦

[AdamPFarnsworth]

Would a heater/AC paired with a thermostat be a very basic form of a digital twin? The thermostat triggers the heat/AC depending on what the measured temperature. Or is there a more basic term for a yes/no or on/off system?

[mmv]

how to use Multi agentic framework to implement DT