My new course on Engineering Digital Twins will be offered in the 2024/2025 academic year for McMaster students.
Outline
Digital twins are real-time virtual replicas of physical assets, typically used for real-time monitoring and control of complex systems, e.g., for energy-efficiency and resource optimization. This course provides an introduction to the foundational engineering areas required to develop digital twins: modeling and simulation for real-time reasoning, collecting and managing data to connect the digital twin to the physical system, and controlling the physical system through closed-loop control. Students will be exposed to the technical depths of these engineering areas and learn about their integration in specific digital twin architectures and lifecycle models. In addition to the lectures, students will process related scientific literature (from domains such as smart cities, industrial automation, or precision agriculture) to further customize their learning experience.
Topics covered
-Broader context and architecture of digital twins (10% of lecture time)
-Reasoning by modeling and simulation (40%)
-Connecting digital and physical twins (40%)
-Implementation and applications (10%)
Format
-Lectures from the instructor (~70%)
-Guest lectures from international and industry experts (~10%)
-Student seminars, paper summaries and presentations (~20%)
Evaluation
-Individual literature processing and presentation: 50% (process 3-4 papers, and report+present the synthesized takeaways)
-Exam 50%