A Graph Neural Network approach to zero-shot Digital Twins
For engineers and researchers needing real-time predictive digital twins that adapt to new geometries without retraining, this work offers a novel solution to a known bottleneck in digital twin adaptability.
The paper introduces a zero-shot Digital Twin framework using a Thermodynamics-Informed Graph Neural Network that enforces physical laws, enabling accurate simulations on unseen geometries without retraining, achieving real-time performance (~25 ms/frame) across viscoelastic beam and fluid sloshing scenarios.
Traditional Predictive Digital Twins often remain geometrically rigid, requiring extensive retraining or fine-tuning whenever the underlying physical domain or boundary conditions change. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel framework for \textit{Zero-Shot Digital Twins} that seamlessly couples real-time visual perception with a geometry-agnostic, physics-informed reasoning engine. At the core of our architecture is the Thermodynamics-Informed Graph Neural Network architecture, a Geometric Deep Learning solver grounded in a metriplectic thermodynamic formalism that enforces energy conservation and non-negative entropy production locally through graph message passing. The framework integrates an auxiliary Graph Neural Network to infer unobservable fields (such as stress tensors or velocity and energy distributions) directly from sparse initial visual boundaries, mitigating numerical start-up transients. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we implement a continuous closed-loop data assimilation mechanism; the pipeline tracks macroscopic deformations and free-surface fluid boundaries in real-time using deep segmentation networks combined with sparse optical flow, dynamically correcting the autoregressive simulation rollout and eliminating numerical drift. To test the validity of our approach, we demonstrate the extreme generalization capabilities of our approach across two disparate physical regimes: the large deformations of a viscoelastic beam and the non-linear sloshing of a viscous fluid. In both scenarios, the unified framework instantiates physically accurate simulations on novel, unseen geometries without case-specific retraining, operating well within real-time latency budgets (approximately 25 ms per frame) and enabling the direct projection of latent mechanical variables via Augmented Reality.