Digital Twins

The Fast-Track Action Committee (FTAC) on Digital Twins (DT) was established April 2024 in response to the 2024 National Academies Report: Foundational Research Gaps and Future Directions for Digital Twins. This FTAC will develop a Digital Twins Research and Development (R&D) Strategic Plan, focusing on the fundamental and cross-cutting research and development challenges and opportunities that span digital twin applications.

According to the National Academies Report, a digital twin is a set of virtual information constructs that mimics the structure, context, and behavior of a natural, engineered, or social system (or system-of-systems), is dynamically updated with data from its physical twin, has a predictive capability, and informs decisions that realize value. The bidirectional interaction between the virtual and the physical is central to the digital twin (National Academies Report, 2024, p. 7).

Digital twins bring together many innovations and have been used in fields such as engineering, manufacturing, and precision medicine. Collection and utilization of data from countless IoT sensors for real-time modeling and simulation, when paired with AI/ML, can yield greater insights to manage and respond to national challenges. This technology has been proposed as a tool for climate change predictions, smart cities, smart agriculture, smart warehouses, energy delivery, design and testing of autonomous systems, military applications, and more.

The FTAC will serve as a coordination mechanism for federal R&D that will advance technology and accelerate the use of/early adoption of the digital twin models to address the Nation’s priorities and fast-track agency missions.