Digital Twin Computer Science Collaboratory (DTCSC)

We aim to support society’s major initiatives, such as the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals, through investigating digital twins for massive infrastructure systems, including transport, power, and water networks, as well as airports and even the geography of nations. The functioning of these physical systems will be driven by analysis and simulation on their digital twins, which closely reflect their current state through sensor data collection.

Digital twins are emerging as a fundamental technology to bolster our understanding and management of the real world. A digital twin provides a replica of a real-world construct, usually closely coupled so that the digital analogue is constantly updated to reflect the status of the real-world construct. Most digital twins can run analyses and simulations on the digital representation to support decision making and control of the real word construct. Digital twins can exist for much of the real world. In construction they can represent 3-waters networks, dams, roading networks, power transmission grids, individual buildings, a suburb, through to a whole city and even a whole country. They have been used for cars, ships planes and factories, through to individuals for medical treatment, and even forests and geological formations.

Driving the capability of digital twins, and underlying all their success, are leading edge techniques from Computer Science. This collaboratory aims to bridge the wide range of expertise we have in computer science to the needs of sophisticated and large-scale digital twins. Computer science can address areas such as: data quality; sensors; visualisation; information security; usable interfaces; AI-based simulation; cloud-based storage and computing; anomaly detection; machine learning of data flows; mobile and on-site access; etc. We are expert in developing collaborative solutions to address needs across all these areas.