An official website of the United States government
Urban drainage systems face increased floods and combined sewer overflows due to climate change and population growth. To manage these hazards, cities are seeking stormwater digital twins that integrate sensor data with hydraulic models for real-time response. However, these efforts are complicated by unreliable sensor data, imperfect hydrologic models, and inaccurate rainfall forecasts. To address these issues, we introduce a stormwater digital twin system that uses online data assimilation to estimate stormwater depths and discharges under sensor and model uncertainty. We first derive a novel state estimation scheme based on Extended Kalman Filtering that fuses sensor data into a hydraulic model while simultaneously detecting and removing faulty measurements. The system’s accuracy is evaluated through a long-term deployment in Austin’s flood-prone Waller Creek watershed. The digital twin model demonstrates enhanced accuracy in estimating stormwater depths at ungauged locations and delivers more accurate near-term forecasts. Moreover, it effectively identifies and removes sensor faults from streaming data, achieving a Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve (ROC AUC) of over 0.99 and significantly reducing the potential for false flood alarms. This study provides a complete software implementation, offering water managers a reliable framework for real-time monitoring, rapid flood response, predictive maintenance, and active control of sewer systems.
more »
« less
Digital twins in urban informatics
Abstract Urban informatics appears to be a suitable area for the application of digital twins. Definitions of the term share some characteristics, but these definitions do not agree on what exactly constitutes a digital twin. The term has the potential to be misleading unless adequate attention is paid to the inherent uncertainty in any replica of a real system. The question of uncertainty is addressed, together with some of the issues that make its quantification problematic. Digital twins for urban informatics pose questions of purpose, governance, and ethics. In the final section the paper suggests some research issues that will need to be addressed if digital twins are to be successful.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2117455
- PAR ID:
- 10540190
- Publisher / Repository:
- Urban Informatics
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Urban Informatics
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2731-6963
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract Digital twins represent a key technology for precision health. Medical digital twins consist of computational models that represent the health state of individual patients over time, enabling optimal therapeutics and forecasting patient prognosis. Many health conditions involve the immune system, so it is crucial to include its key features when designing medical digital twins. The immune response is complex and varies across diseases and patients, and its modelling requires the collective expertise of the clinical, immunology, and computational modelling communities. This review outlines the initial progress on immune digital twins and the various initiatives to facilitate communication between interdisciplinary communities. We also outline the crucial aspects of an immune digital twin design and the prerequisites for its implementation in the clinic. We propose some initial use cases that could serve as “proof of concept” regarding the utility of immune digital technology, focusing on diseases with a very different immune response across spatial and temporal scales (minutes, days, months, years). Lastly, we discuss the use of digital twins in drug discovery and point out emerging challenges that the scientific community needs to collectively overcome to make immune digital twins a reality.more » « less
-
Abstract Digital twins, customized simulation models pioneered in industry, are beginning to be deployed in medicine and healthcare, with some major successes, for instance in cardiovascular diagnostics and in insulin pump control. Personalized computational models are also assisting in applications ranging from drug development to treatment optimization. More advanced medical digital twins will be essential to making precision medicine a reality. Because the immune system plays an important role in such a wide range of diseases and health conditions, from fighting pathogens to autoimmune disorders, digital twins of the immune system will have an especially high impact. However, their development presents major challenges, stemming from the inherent complexity of the immune system and the difficulty of measuring many aspects of a patient’s immune state in vivo. This perspective outlines a roadmap for meeting these challenges and building a prototype of an immune digital twin. It is structured as a four-stage process that proceeds from a specification of a concrete use case to model constructions, personalization, and continued improvement.more » « less
-
Abstract A growing body of literature argues that digital models do not just help organizational leaders to predict the future. Models can inadvertently produce the very future they purport to describe. In this view,performativityis a side-effect of digital modeling. But digital twins turn such thinking on its head. Digital twins are digital models that are designed to be performative—changes in the model are supposed to produce corresponding changes in the world the model represents. This is what makes digital twins useful. But for decision-makers to act in ways that align the world outside the model with the predictions contained within, they must first believe that the model is a faithful representation. In other words, for a digital twin to become performative, it must first be taken-for-granted as “real”. In this paper, we explore the technological and organizational characteristics that are likely to shape the level of taken-for-grantedness of a digital twin.more » « less
-
Urban digital twins (UDTs) have been identified as a potential technology to achieve digital transformative positive urban change through landscape architecture and urban planning. However, how this new technology will influence community resilience and adaptation planning is currently unclear. This article: (1) offers a scoping review of existing studies constructing UDTs, (2) identifies challenges and opportunities of UDT technologies for community adaptation planning, and (3) develops a conceptual framework of UDTs for community infrastructure resilience. This article highlights the need for integrating multi-agent interactions, artificial intelligence, and coupled natural–physical–social systems into a human-centered UDTs framework to improve community infrastructure resilience.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s44212-024-00048-6
