Digital Twin Overview

tags: Digital Twin

Up to date by September 2022

Disclaimer: The following book has some work in progress, or discontinued work and as such should not be viewed as completed products. It is presented for transparency into the different BSCI initiatives.

Summary

A digital twin is a representation of a system which can be used for prototyping, stress testing and a variety of other simulation based purposes. There are two types of digital twins:

1. Design Digital Twin: A digital twin used for prototyping a system and working through mechanism design
2. Operational Digital Twin: A proxy for an established system used to further refine the system, verify the current behavior patterns and monitor different aspects

BlockScience created a digital twin representation for the filecoin macroeconomy (please contact BlockScience for access to the github repository) to aid in simulating possible system changes and monitor the state of other pieces of system state. This book links to the digital twin specific documents.

Documents

• Feasibility Analysis for Building a Block-Time Digital Twin: An analysis of the possibility of a block level digital twin
• Filecoin Digital Twin Project Plan: A project plan of the daily level digital twin work streams left to be completed
• Digital Twin Business Questions: A list of business questions that the digital twin can answer
• Filecoin operational DT agent behavior implementation requirements: An analysis of different digital twin behavior patterns and how mocking them up might look
• Operational Digital Twin Development Roadmap: A roadmap for getting the digital twin to be an operational digital twin

Use Cases

Some of the possible use cases of the digital twin are:

1. Testing a mechanism over a range of parameters
2. Validating the current mechanisms are working as expected in a backtest
3. Extrapolating future behavior to flag early on potential system instability/issues
4. Simulating the impact of different mechanism changes or additions
5. Aggregating data about the system through backtest runs
6. Serving as a reference implementation

Possible Future Initiatives

1. Using the daily level digital twin for further testing of mechanism design
2. Building out the operational digital twin infrastructure
3. Creating a block level digital twin