Digital twin as risk-free experimentation aid for techno-socio-economic systems
Souvik Barat, Vinay Kulkarni, Tony Clark, Balbir Barn
Abstract
Environmental uncertainties and hyperconnectivity force technosocio-economic systems to introspect and adapt to succeed and survive. Current practices in decision-making are predominantly intuition-driven with attendant challenges for precision and rigor. We propose to use the concept of digital twins by combining results from Modelling & Simulation, Artificial Intelligence, and Control Theory to create a risk free 'in silico' experimentation aid to help: (i) understand why a system is the way it is, (ii) be prepared for possible outlier conditions, and (iii) identify plausible solutions for mitigating the outlier conditions in an evidence-backed manner. We use reinforcement learning to systematically explore the digital twin solution space. Our proposal is significant because it advances the effective use of digital twins to new problem domains that have new potential for impact. Our approach contributes an original meta model for simulatable digital twin of industry scale techno-socioeconomic systems, agent-based implementation of the digital twin, and an architecture that serves as a risk-free experimentation aid to support simulation-based evidence-backed decision-making. We also discuss the rigor of our validation of the proposed approach and associated technology infrastructure through a representative sample of industry-scale real-world use cases.