The role of surrogate models in the development of digital twins of dynamic systems
This work addresses the lack of clarity in applying digital twins for dynamic systems in industrial sectors like aerospace and automotive, but it is incremental as it builds on existing surrogate modeling techniques.
The paper tackled the slow adoption of digital twin technology by exploring the use of Gaussian process emulators as surrogate models for a discrete damped dynamic system, demonstrating their potential effectiveness through numerical simulations with variations in stiffness, mass, noise, and data sparsity.
Digital twin technology has significant promise, relevance and potential of widespread applicability in various industrial sectors such as aerospace, infrastructure and automotive. However, the adoption of this technology has been slower due to the lack of clarity for specific applications. A discrete damped dynamic system is used in this paper to explore the concept of a digital twin. As digital twins are also expected to exploit data and computational methods, there is a compelling case for the use of surrogate models in this context. Motivated by this synergy, we have explored the possibility of using surrogate models within the digital twin technology. In particular, the use of Gaussian process (GP) emulator within the digital twin technology is explored. GP has the inherent capability of addressing noise and sparse data and hence, makes a compelling case to be used within the digital twin framework. Cases involving stiffness variation and mass variation are considered, individually and jointly along with different levels of noise and sparsity in data. Our numerical simulation results clearly demonstrate that surrogate models such as GP emulators have the potential to be an effective tool for the development of digital twins. Aspects related to data quality and sampling rate are analysed. Key concepts introduced in this paper are summarised and ideas for urgent future research needs are proposed.