This Open for Business event was part of an INI programme on the mathematical and statistical foundation of future data-driven engineering and aims to bring together the community to discuss the latest research and innovation in digital twinning for engineering, providing an opportunity for networking and help foster cross-disciplinary connections 

Background 

A digital twin is a computer model that simulates an object or process in the physical world. This could be a jet engine, bridge, wind turbine, Formula One car, supply chain, biological system, factory, or even an entire city. The digital twin is regularly updated with sensor data from its physical counterpart, and by analysing the twin, decision makers can gain insights into the behaviour of the physical system, allowing them to improve its design and/or functioning. 

The idea of using a digital simulation to understand a physical object is not a new one. In 1970, for instance, NASA mission controllers used computer simulations of the stricken Apollo 13 spacecraft to safely bring the astronauts home following an onboard explosion. Over the past decade, however, digital twins have reached new levels of sophistication, thanks to the decreasing cost of computation, the availability of low-cost, high-fidelity sensors, and advances in wireless communication technologies. As the science of digital twinning develops, artificial intelligence (AI) will play an ever more important role in their design, development, and deployment – whether in optimising the design of the twins themselves, or in identifying hidden patterns and structures in their output data.  As such, digital twins are providing powerful use cases for AI and are beginning to radically reshape our understanding of complex systems in numerous domains – from health, climate and energy to engineering, logistics, economics and beyond – and may prove crucial to tackling to urgent societal issues such as climate change. 

Aims & Objectives 

The aim of this event was to bring together the community to discuss the latest research and innovation in digital twinning for engineering; provide opportunity for networking and help foster cross-disciplinary connections. 

A  Programme is available in the left hand panel. 

The event started with registration at 10:00am on Wednesday 7th June, with talks until 5.15pm, followed by a networking reception at 5.15pm – 6.15pm. All timings are BST (GMT+1). 

Posters 

For those attending in person, there was the opportunity to present a poster. 

Registration and Venue 

Registrations to this event are now closed, for any questions, please contact gateway@newton.ac.uk 

The workshop took place at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Please visit the Isaac Newton Institute website for further information about the venue. 

To maximize networking opportunities and interaction with speakers and other participants, we strongly encouraged in-person attendance to this workshop. However, this event was also hosted as hybrid via Zoom.