The research group is included in a long list of externally funded innovation and research projects with funding from many different agencies. We also collaborate with all the other research groups in the Software Engineering and Computer Systems section as well as most of the other sections in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. We also have the Digital Transformation Lab in Skjern as well as the Robotics Digital Twin Lab in Aarhus.
The lead of the digital twin research group is Professor Peter Gorm Larsen and he is also in charge of two centers: DIGIT (the Aarhus University (AU) Centre for Digitalisation, Big Data and Data Analytics including 15 Departments at AU) and the AU Centre for Digital Twins.
We have mostly researched the engineering of digital twins for Cyber-Physical Systems. We have produced numerous research results which are used by many organisations all over the world. Most of these belong to the non-for-profit INTO-CPS Association and this includes the Digital Twin as a Service (DTaaS) solution.
All of these can be used freely for research purposes, and also commercially if one is a member of the association. The book mentioned in the grey box is also used for teaching purposes at the MSc level in a 10 ECTS course.
Digital twins are hyped a lot at the moment and there are numerous definitions of digital twins. In our work we use the definition from our recent book about engineering digital twins (John Fitzgerald, Claudio Gomes and Peter Gorm Larsen (eds), The Engineering of Digital Twins, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-031-66718-3, September 2024):
A Digital Twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity which we call the Physical Twin. The Digital Twin and the Physical Twin are connected by a communications infrastructure which allows the Digital Twin to maintain a known level of fidelity to the Physical Twin it represents. A Digital Twin offers its stakeholders a range of services that add value to the Physical Twin without unduly compromising the Physical Twin's operation.
