MPEX AI Digital Twins Milestone Report

TL;DR

This report details six months of progress on the MPEX AI Digital Twins project, including milestones for AI-driven control systems and damage assessment prototypes, with ongoing software interface development for data analysis and validation.

Contribution

The paper presents initial milestones and software integration efforts for AI digital twins in fusion energy research, advancing automation and data analysis capabilities.

Findings

Milestones for Helicon AI Hot-Spot Controller and E-beam Damage Assessment Digital Twin are on track.

Progress in configuring Galaxy software for automation and data analysis.

Integration with DOE HPC resources and future connection to AmSC.

Abstract

This is the six month progress report to Fusion Energy Science (FES) and the American Science Cloud (AmSC) on the MPEX AI Digtial Twins project that was started in October 2025. There are two milestones to demonstrate the Artificial Intelligence (AI) advantage for MPEX operations and scientific discovery, that will be completed by June 2026. The first is a Helicon AI Hot-Spot Controller (Sec. 3.1), which is the helicon heating component of the more comprehensive planned MPEX AI Hot Spot Digital Twin (Sec. 3). The second is an E-beam Damage Assessment Digital Twin (Sec. 4.1), which is a reduced electron beam damage modality prototype for the MPEX AI Damage Assessment Digital Twin (Sec. 4). These two phase I milestones are on track for the June demonstration. In addition to these two milestones, progress on configuring the Galaxy software interface for automation, validation and data analysis is reported (Sec. 5). This interface now connects a subset of the main physics simulation codes to DOE HPC resources and will connect to the MPEX data acquisition system so that analysis of data, validation and execution of simulations can be performed by the scientist or by AI-Agents. When AmSC is ready to accept connections and data, Galaxy will be the MPEX interface to AmSC