Collection

Advanced Optimization Enabling Digital Twin Technology

A digital twin is a real-time digital/virtual representation of a physical product or process. The digital twin technology is centered around “individualized” digital models that capture the unique characteristics of individual product or process units. These models allow decision making to be optimized for each product or process unit, rather than based on the average characteristics of the entire population. This emerging technology poses new and challenging optimization problems at the forefront of model-based design, smart manufacturing, industrial IoT, machine learning (ML), and predictive maintenance. The industry-scale adoption of the digital twin concept entails creating novel optimization solutions that use data coming in from sensors and inspections (physical-to-digital) to provide decision makers with actionable information (digital-to-physical), thereby closing the digitalization loop. Major benefits include the ability to optimize control/maintenance actions to individual units and the potential to optimize the design of next-generation products. This Special Issue is dedicated to the current state-of-the-art and future directions of advanced optimization enabling the digital twin technology. It will include original papers with clear relevance to the optimization of structures, fluids, or another major physics, contributed by researchers and practitioners from the fields of engineering design, smart manufacturing, structural health monitoring, prognostics and health management, model-based predictive control, and others.

Editors

  • Chao Hu

    Iowa State University, USA

  • Vicente A. Gonzalez

    University of Auckland, New Zealand

  • Taejin Kim

    JeonBuk National University, South Korea

  • Omer San

    Oklahoma State University, USA

  • Zhen Hu

    University of Michigan, USA

Articles (19 in this collection)