Digital twins is one of those newer concepts that agencies will need to become more familiar with. If they aren’t familiar with this terminology, the National Academies report, Foundational Research Gaps and Future Directions for Digital Twins defined a digital twin as “a set of virtual information constructs that mimics the structure, context and behavior of a natural, engineered or social system or system-of-systems. It is dynamically updated with data from its physical twin, has a predictive capability and informs decisions that realize value.”

The use of digital twins are not necessarily new to many sectors like in transportation, which uses it to track the wear and tear of  jet engines, locomotives and gas turbines. But now with the rise of sensors and the ability to turn data into knowledge and value, agencies are seeing more opportunities to take advantage of these tools.

The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office (NCO), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation released a request for information last summer seeking input on the creation of a National Digital Twins research and development strategic plan.

The OSTP and NITRD said they will release the strategic plan in mid-2025.

In the meantime, agencies aren’t waiting for the plan, but already are taking advantage of digital twins.

The Energy Department’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office is using digital twins to perform life-cycle analysis of products, starting from the design stage all the way to use and then to post-use.

Sudarsan Rachuri, the technology manager of the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, said digital twins can enable this type of life cycle analysis and synthesis.

“We are focusing, especially my office, on the global manufacturing ecosystem, how it is rapidly evolving and becoming highly competitive. More importantly, with the pandemic, we have to think about how we have supply chain resiliency in that,” Rachuri said on the discussion Digital Twins and Synthetic Data: The Next Frontier of Government Productivity. “The crucial aspect of digital twins are cyber-physical systems that we connect everything to everything else. Digital twins are an aspect of engineering where we can connect from the product to the process to the manufacturing equipment and all the way to the supply chain. There are lots of opportunities here, especially for us.”

NASA focused on Earth sciences

NASA has been taking advantage of concepts like digital twins since the Apollo 13 mission in 1970.

Jacqueline Le Moigne, the program manager for advanced information systems technology at NASA, said the space agency is using digital twins today for many other things, including earth science applications.

“For example, investigating how climate change is going to impact other systems, but also how it is going to impact human and anthropomorphic systems, and how the humans are also going to impact the earth science. So it goes in both directions,” Le Moigne said. “We are looking at earth systems and digital twins from three main components. We are looking at the digital replica, which often is referred to as a digital twin, but the digital replica is the representation part.”

Le Moigne said NASA also is looking at two other components around its use of digital twins. One is the “what’s next,” which is a forecasting capability trying to determine what is going to happen under nominal conditions. The third component is the “what if,” which means what could happen if NASA changes some conditions, whether it was boundary or variables.

“The digital twin is the entire information system that allows you to look at these three main components of what now, the what next, and the what if, and this is very important to look at many different earth systems, whether it’s looking at hydrology, wildfires, agriculture, air quality and currently we are looking at prototype digital twin for coastal zones, which represent many different arth systems that can impact a lot of human populations living on the coast,” she said. “The advantage is that with one digital replica, you can have multiple types of users that can use this data. Of course, we with different interfaces, with different permission to use the models, but this is one big component. The other component is that for this digital replica to be really a twin, we need to ingest new and timely data in a continuous manner. This digital twin will need to be updated, refreshed very regularly, so that, they represent the exact state of the system.”

Similar to NASA, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency‘s Foundation GEOINT is applying digital twins to earth systems for the physical and cultural characteristics of the Earth. The areas of focus include maritime geography, topography, geomatics and basically everything that describes the Earth’s features.

NGA keeping digital tools relative

Todd Johanesen, the director of the Foundation GEOINT Group at NGA, said his office is taking all of these geospatial objects and data services and assembling them into a more cohesive unit that can be shared digitally and on paper.

“We are seeing that the [military] services, in particular, are changing their requirements. They still want their hard copy products, or a version of their hard copy products, but they also want more geospatial information or geospatial data, for instance, to program into a navigation system to also meet their requirements,” Johanesen said. “If we can move it to a stage where we collect the data one time and serve it up for multiple purposes, across all these different domains, they can really just come to one place to get the data and do what they need with it.”

The accelerated use of digital twins by public and private sector organizations can be traced to several factors.

Paul Venditti, an advisory industry consultant for IoT at SAS, said the proliferation of sensors across cyber and physical systems is one major reason.

Another, he said, is the ability to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to better analyze the data.

“The fact that there’s a bi-directional flow of data is also a critical thing with digital twins. You’re having the data come from your physical environment into a modeling environment,” Venditti said. “We create that virtual replica; you’re running analytics on it to inform your decision making. The main point is you’re trying to use these interdisciplinary technologies to really get insights from your digital twin to make decisions.”

Benefits of digital twins growing

Venditti added the NASA, NGA and Energy examples are just a few of the real and potential opportunities to use digital twins across multiple domains.

He said using digital twins for public safety, especially for flood predictions and preparedness, is one of those areas ripe for the technology.

“Certainly there’s productivity of response times and being able to operate quickly in those dire situations. Public safety stands alone as a critical benefit of digital twins,” he said. “There’s probably numerous use cases that also overlap with predictive maintenance. We’ve also done that for rail car wheels. So rail car wheels are 60% of the operations and maintenance costs for tier one rail companies. We also know that that’s where there’s a safety risk if those wheels are not operating safely. We’ve seen derailments, so these aren’t mutually exclusive benefits.”

NGA’s Johanesen added for DoD, digital twins provides service members the ability to train with operational data.

“For instance, a soldier can train in a virtual environment with a whole host of geospatial data, and then when they go into an operational environment, they’re using that same data. The look and the feel,  it’s really not any different than what it was that they train with,” he said. “Maybe the data is more of a background, more intuitive, but again, something that they’re already familiar with, and not something that they have to worry about again when they’re in a confusing operational environment.”

The reason why Energy, NASA, the NGA and so many agencies can take more advantage of digital twins is the underlying technology has improved so much.

Rachuri said the cloud enables bi-directional sharing of information between cyber and physical assets, and then when you add artificial intelligence on top of that foundational infrastructure, the interconnection becomes easier and faster.

Key topics:

• Current and potential uses of digital twins in government
• Benefits and challenges of adopting digital twin technology
• The impact of AI and generative AI on digital twin applications
• Preparing infrastructure, data and workforce for digital twin adoption