Tag Archives: digital twin

Opportunities lost in knowledge management using digital technology

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Decorative imageRegular readers of this blog will know that I occasionally feature publications from my research group.  The most recent was ‘Predicting release rates of hydrogen from stainless steel’ on September 13th, 2023 and before that ‘Label-free real-tracking of individual bacterium’ on January 25th 2023 and ‘A thermal emissions-based real-time monitoring system for in situ detection of cracks’ in ‘Seeing small changes is a big achievement’ on October 26th 2023.  The subject of these publications might seem a long way apart but they are linked by my interest in trying to measure events in the real-world and use the data to develop and validate high-fidelity digital models.  Recently, I have stretched my research interests still further through supervising a clutch of PhD students with a relatively new collaborator working in the social sciences.  Two of the students have had their first papers published by the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).  Their papers are not directly connected but they both explore the use of published information to gain new insights on a topic.  In the first one [1], we have explored the similarities and differences between safety cases for three nuclear reactors: a pair of research reactors – one fission and one fusion reactor; and a commercial fission reactor.  We have developed a graphical representation of the safety features in the reactors and their relationships to the fundamental safety principles set out by the nuclear regulators. This has allowed us to gain a better understanding of the hazard profiles of fission and fusion reactors that could be used to create the safety case for a commercial fusion reactor.  Fundamentally, this paper is about exploiting existing knowledge and looking at it in a new way to gain fresh insights, which we did manually rather than automating the process using digital technology.  In the second paper [2], we have explored the extent to which digital technologies are being used to create, collate and curate knowledge during and beyond the life-cycle of an engineering product.  We found that these processes were happening but generally not in a holistic manner.  Consequently, opportunities were being lost through not deploying digital technology in knowledge management to undertake multiple roles simultaneously, e.g., acting as repositories, transactive memory systems (group-level knowledge sharing), communication spaces, boundary objects (contact points between multiple disciplines, systems or worlds) and non-human actors.  There are significant challenges, as well as competitive advantages and organisational value to be gained, in deploying digital technology in holistic approaches to knowledge management.  However, despite the rapid advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence [see ‘Update on position of AI on hype curve: it cannot dream’ on July 26th 2023] that will certainly accelerate and enhance knowledge management in a digital environment, a human is still required to realise the value of the knowledge and use it creatively.

References

  1. Nguyen, T., Patterson, E.A., Taylor, R.J., Tseng, Y.S. and Waldon, C., 2023. Comparative maps of safety features for fission and fusion reactors. Journal of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science, pp.1-24
  2. Yao, Y., Patterson, E.A. and Taylor, R.J., 2023. The Influence of Digital Technologies on Knowledge Management in Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

Slicing the cake equally or engineering justice

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Decorative photograph of sliced chocolate cakeIn support of the research being performed by one of the PhD students that I am supervising, I have been reading about ‘energy justice’.  Energy justice involves the equitable sharing of the benefits and burdens of the production and consumption of energy, including the fair treatment of individuals and communities when making decisions about energy.  At the moment our research is focussed on the sharing of the burdens associated with energy production and ways in which digital technology might improve decision-making processes.  Justice incorporates the distribution of rights, liberties, power, opportunities, and money – sometimes known as ‘primary goods’.  The theory of justice proposed by the American philosopher, John Rawls in the 1970’s is a recurring theme: that these primary goods should be distributed in a manner a hypothetical person would choose, if, at the time, they were ignorant of their own status in society.  In my family, this is the principle we use to divide cakes and other goodies equally between us, i.e., the person slicing the cake is the last person to take a slice.  While many in society overlook the inequalities and injustices that sustain their privileged positions, I believe that engineers have a professional responsibility to work towards the equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of engineering on the individuals and communities, i.e., ‘engineering justice’ [see ‘Where science meets society‘ on September 2nd, 2015].  This likely involves creating a more diverse engineering profession which is better equipped to generate engineering solutions that address the needs of the whole of our global society [see ‘Re-engineering engineering‘ on August 30th, 2017].  However, it also requires us to rethink our decision-making processes to achieve  ‘engineering justice’.  There is a clear and close link to ‘procedure justice’ and ‘fair process’ [see ‘Advice to abbots and other leaders‘ November 13th, 2019] which involves listening to people, making a decision, then explaining the decision to everyone concerned.  In our research, we are interested in how digital environments, including digital twins and industrial metaverses, might enable wider and more informed involvement in decision-making about major engineering infrastructure projects, with energy as our starting point.

Sources:

Derbyshire J, Justice, fairness and why Rawls still matters today, FT Weekend, April 20th, 2023.

MacGregor N, How to transcend the culture wars, FT Weekend, April 29/30th, 2023.

Rawls J, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1971

Sovacool BK & Dworkin MH, Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles and Practices, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Image: https://www.alsothecrumbsplease.com/air-fryer-chocolate-cake/

When less is more from describing digital twins to protoplasm

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Word cluster diagramI spent several days last week reading drafts of PhD theses from two of my students.  I have three PhD students who are scheduled to finish their studies before Easter when they plan to start jobs that they have already been offered.  So, there is some urgency to their writing besides the usual desire to finish after three years or more of work on the same topic and the end of their funding.  Their relatively undiluted study of their topic can make it difficult for PhD students to see the big picture and write accessible descriptions of their research.  I have also encountered this challenge in describing our recent work on integrating digital twins to form an engineering metaverse.  There are dozens of published definitions of digital twins whereas the reverse holds for metaverses – no one really knows what they are.  Mary Midgley wrote, in her book ‘Beast and Man’, that descriptions should not be an account of everything about an entity or event but just enough to bring to our minds the appropriate conceptual scheme or construct that will tell us everything we need to know.  Our challenge as communicators is identifying the conceptual scheme that is needed, in other words selecting what matters and nothing else.  I like her example of an inappropriate description: “a section of protoplasm, measuring 1.76 meters vertically, emerged at 2:06 P.M. from hole in building at point x on plan and moved northward, its extremities landing alternately on concrete substratum, finally entering hole in further building, at point y on plan, at 2:09 P.M.”  If you need a conceptual scheme to understand this sentence, then try ‘a person walked across the road’.

Source: Mary Midgley, Beast and Man – the roots of human nature. Abingdon, Oxon. Routledge Classics, 2002.

Image: Cluster #1: simulation along product life cycle from Semeraro C, Lezoche M, Panetto H & Dassisti M, Digital twin paradigm: a systematic literature review, Computers in Industry, 130: 103469, 2021 who found thirty definitions of digital twins and created five such clusters of definitions.

Are we in a simulation?

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Decorative photograph of trains at terminusThe concept of digital twins is gaining acceptance and our ability to generate them is advancing [see ‘Digital twins that thrive in the real-world’ on June 9th, 2021].  It is conceivable that we will be able to simulate many real-world systems in the not-too-distant future.  Perhaps not in my life-time but possibly in this century we will be able to connect these simulations together to create a computer-generated world.  This raises the possibility that other forms of life might have already reached this stage of technology development and that we are living in one of their simulations.  We cannot know for certain that we are not in a simulation but equally we cannot know for certain that we are in a simulation.  If some other life form had reached the stage of being able to simulate the universe then there is a possibility that they would do it for entertainment, so we might exist inside the equivalent of a teenager’s smart phone, or for scientific exploration in which case we might be inside one of thousands of simulations being performed simultaneously in a lab computer to gather statistical evidence on the development of universes.  It seems probable that there would be many more simulations performed for scientific research than for entertainment, so if we are in a simulation then it is more likely that the creator of the simulation is a scientist who is uninterested in this particular one in which we exist.  Of course, an alternative scenario is that humans become extinct before reaching the stage of being able to simulate the world or the universe.  If extinction occurs as a result of our inability to manage the technological advances, which would allow us to simulate the world, then it seems less likely that other life forms would have avoided this fate and so the probability that we are in a simulation should be reduced.  You could also question whether other life forms would have the same motivations or desires to create computer simulations of evolutionary history.  There are lots of reasons for doubting that we are in a computer simulation but it does not seem possible to be certain about it.

David J Chalmers explains the probability that we are in a simulation much more elegantly and comprehensively than me in his book Reality+; virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy, published by Penguin in 2022.