Data-Centric Engineering: integrating simulation, machine learning and statistics. Challenges and Opportunities
This is an incremental review that addresses the problem of improving engineering modeling for researchers and practitioners by combining simulations, machine learning, and statistics.
The paper reviews the emerging field of data-centric engineering, which tackles the challenge of integrating mechanistic models and data-driven approaches to enhance modeling in physical disciplines, highlighting its transformative potential and key challenges.
Recent advances in machine learning, coupled with low-cost computation, availability of cheap streaming sensors, data storage and cloud technologies, has led to widespread multi-disciplinary research activity with significant interest and investment from commercial stakeholders. Mechanistic models, based on physical equations, and purely data-driven statistical approaches represent two ends of the modelling spectrum. New hybrid, data-centric engineering approaches, leveraging the best of both worlds and integrating both simulations and data, are emerging as a powerful tool with a transformative impact on the physical disciplines. We review the key research trends and application scenarios in the emerging field of integrating simulations, machine learning, and statistics. We highlight the opportunities that such an integrated vision can unlock and outline the key challenges holding back its realisation. We also discuss the bottlenecks in the translational aspects of the field and the long-term upskilling requirements of the existing workforce and future university graduates.