A Graph-Based Model Reduction Method for Digital Twins

Abstract

Digital twin technology is the talking point of academia and industry. When defining a digital twin, new modeling paradigms and computational methods are needed. Developments in the Internet of Things and advanced simulation and modeling techniques have provided new strategies for building complex digital twins. The digital twin is a virtual entity representation of the physical entity, such as a product or a process. This virtual entity is a collection of computationally complex knowledge models that embeds all the information of the physical world. To that end, this article proposes a graph-based representation of the virtual entity. This graph-based representation provides a method to visualize the parameter and their interactions across different modeling domains. However, the virtual entity graph becomes inherently complex with multiple parameters for a complex multidimensional physical system. This research contributes to the body of knowledge with a novel graph-based model reduction method that simplifies the virtual entity analysis. The graph-based model reduction method uses graph structure preserving algorithms and Dempster–Shaffer Theory to provide the importance of the parameters in the virtual entity. The graph-based model reduction method is validated by benchmarking it against the random forest regressor method. The method is tested on a turbo compressor case study. In the future, a method such as graph-based model reduction needs to be integrated with digital twin frameworks to provide digital services by the twin efficiently.

Keywords

• digital twin
• graph-based knowledge representation
• model fusion
• model reduction
• importance measurement