A Theoretical Open Architecture Framework and Technology Stack for Digital Twins in Energy Sector Applications

Sri Nikhil Gupta Gourisetti, Sraddhanjoli Bhadra, David Jonathan Sebastian-Cardenas (), Md Touhiduzzaman and Osman Ahmed
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Sri Nikhil Gupta Gourisetti: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA
Sraddhanjoli Bhadra: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA
David Jonathan Sebastian-Cardenas: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA
Md Touhiduzzaman: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA
Osman Ahmed: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 13, 1-58

Abstract: Digital twin is often viewed as a technology that can assist engineers and researchers make data-driven system and network-level decisions. Across the scientific literature, digital twins have been consistently theorized as a strong solution to facilitate proactive discovery of system failures, system and network efficiency improvement, system and network operation optimization, among others. With their strong affinity to the industrial metaverse concept, digital twins have the potential to offer high-value propositions that are unique to the energy sector stakeholders to realize the true potential of physical and digital convergence and pertinent sustainability goals. Although the technology has been known for a long time in theory, its practical real-world applications have been so far limited, nevertheless with tremendous growth projections. In the energy sector, there have been theoretical and lab-level experimental analysis of digital twins but few of those experiments resulted in real-world deployments. There may be many contributing factors to any friction associated with real-world scalable deployment in the energy sector such as cost, regulatory, and compliance requirements, and measurable and comparable methods to evaluate performance and return on investment. Those factors can be potentially addressed if the digital twin applications are built on the foundations of a scalable and interoperable framework that can drive a digital twin application across the project lifecycle: from ideation to theoretical deep dive to proof of concept to large-scale experiment to real-world deployment at scale. This paper is an attempt to define a digital twin open architecture framework that comprises a digital twin technology stack (D-Arc) coupled with information flow, sequence, and object diagrams. Those artifacts can be used by energy sector engineers and researchers to use any digital twin platform to drive research and engineering. This paper also provides critical details related to cybersecurity aspects, data management processes, and relevant energy sector use cases.

Keywords: digital twin; energy; power grid; digital twin cybersecurity; digital twin technology stack; digital twin framework; digital twin use cases (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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