A Digital Twinning Approach to Decarbonisation: Research Challenges

TL;DR

This paper proposes a federated digital twinning approach to enable comprehensive monitoring and understanding of the entire transportation system for effective decarbonisation, addressing current siloed efforts and systemic complexity.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a federated digital twin framework for transport decarbonisation, outlining key research challenges in design, generation, validation, and verification.

Findings

Highlights the need for system-level monitoring of transport

Identifies fundamental challenges in digital twin development

Proposes federated approach for integrated transport decarbonisation

Abstract

Transportation accounts for around 27% of green house gas emissions in the UK. While an obvious priority area for decarbonisation, and aligned to the UK government goal of reducing emissions by 68% for 2030, the free-market nature of the transportation sector combined with its fundamentally implicit and pervasive connections to all aspects of society and national infrastructure mean that all decarbonisation efforts to date have been siloed within a single transport sector, e.g. only considering greener aviation fuels. Truly decarbonising transport requires radical changes to the entire transport infrastructure, and since that transport does not happen in isolation, a single user often using multiple modes, we need a view over the whole transport system. The first step to solving a problem is to understand it. As a result of the fragmented nature of the transportation sector, there is currently no system level view. Without the ability to monitor even adjacent transport domains, the ability for people or organisations to (dynamically) adapt their operations for decarbonisation outcomes is unrealistic. As transportation is a complex social-techno-economic system, information and knowledge sharing is a must to be able to understand and explore potential solutions to the decarbonisation challenge. We believe a Federated Digital Twinning Approach has the potential to tackle transport decarbonisation problems, and, in this extended abstract, we give an overview of the research required to tackle the fundamental challenges around digital twin design, generation, validation and verification.