Foundational Research Gaps and Future Directions for Digital Twins (2024)
Chapter: Appendix A: Statement of Task
A
Statement of Task
A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine–appointed ad hoc committee will identify needs and opportunities to advance the mathematical, statistical, and computational foundations of digital twins in applications across science, medicine, engineering, and society. In so doing, the committee will address the following questions:
Definitions and use cases:
- How are digital twins defined across communities?
- What example use cases demonstrate the value of digital twins that are currently in deployment or development?
Foundational mathematical, statistical, and computational gaps:
- What foundational gaps and research opportunities exist in achieving robust reliable digital twins at scale?
- How do these foundational gaps or opportunities vary across communities and application domains?
- What are the roles of data-driven learning and computational modeling (including mechanistic modeling) in achieving robust and reliable digital twins at scale? What data are needed to enable this modeling?
- What are the needs for validation, verification, and uncertainty quantification of digital twins, and how do these needs vary across communities?
Best practices for digital twin development and use:
- What best or promising practices for digital twins are emerging within and across application domains?
- What opportunities exist for translation of best practices across domains? What challenges exist for translation of best practices across domains?
- How are difficult issues such as verification, validation, reproducibility, certification, security, ethics, consent, and privacy being addressed within domains? What lessons can be applied to other domains where digital twins are nascent?
Moving forward:
- What use cases could advance awareness of and confidence in digital twins?
- What are the key challenges and opportunities in the research, development, and application of advancements in digital twin development and application?
- What roles could stakeholders (e.g., federal research funders, industry, academia, professional societies) play in advancing the development of rigorous scalable foundations of digital twins across scientific, medical, engineering, and societal domains and in encouraging collaboration across communities?
The ad hoc committee will conduct three public workshops and other data-gathering activities to inform its findings, conclusions, and recommendations, which will be provided in the form of a consensus report.
The public workshops will present and discuss the opportunities (e.g., methods, practices, use cases) and challenges for the development and use of digital twins in three separate contexts: biomedical domains, Earth and environmental systems, and engineering. These workshops will bring together diverse stakeholders and experts to address the following topics:
- Definitions and taxonomy of digital twins within the specified domain, including identification of exemplar use cases of digital twins;
- Current methods and promising practices for digital twin development and use at various levels of complexity;
- Key technical challenges and opportunities in the near and long term for digital twin development and use; and
- Opportunities for translation of promising practices from other fields and domains.
The presentations and discussions during the workshops will be summarized and published in three separate Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief documents.
