Digital twins |
Double vision
Digital twin technology has an increasingly valuable role to play within the hydro industry
Right: Digital twin technology is viewed as a promising approach to improving efficiency, reliability and sustainability in many industries
Above: New research has been looking at how digital twin technology can be applied to watershed management
DIGITAL TWIN TECHNOLOGY – a virtual replica of a physical system, process, or product that enables real-time monitoring, analysis, and optimisation of its performance – has gained significant attention in recent years as a promising approach for improving the efficiency, reliability, and sustainability of various industries, DongSoon Park and Hojun You state in their recent research published in the journal Water. As the authors claim, active discussions are also underway about whether efficiency and productivity can be increased by digitalising traditional knowledge-based watershed and water infrastructure management. The water management sector is currently
Below: Aftermath of the failures of a tailings dam in Brazil. A digital twin research project could lead to a paradigm shift in monitoring these facilities
experiencing a significant wave of digital innovations – such as investigations into changes in surface water area using the Google Earth Engine cloud platform, or examining the characteristics and design of a Web GIS Platform for monitoring water resources, and exploring the potential of digital solutions to enhance public awareness of urban water management issues. However, despite these ‘commendable efforts’, Park and You say that to the best of their knowledge, there have been few attempts to apply digital twin technology across an entire dam and river basin for comprehensive digitalised smart water resource management and data-driven decision-making. Therefore their paper, called A Digital Twin Dam and Watershed Management Platform, provides an overview of realistic digital twins in the field of water resource management, their applications, as well as potential future developments. “The advantage of digital twins in large-scale water management lies in innovations in productivity and efficiency in the way we work,” the authors explain. “They can also reduce time and labour, and improve reliability in the decision-making process. In the field of water management of dams and rivers, the benefit of digitalisation is ‘data-based smart water management.’
18 | April 2024 |
www.waterpowermagazine.com
The goal is to solve many tasks that have been routinely carried out in the past more intuitively, reliably, and quickly with the help of the digital world.” The advantages of the pursuit of digital twins in smart water resource management can be summarised by five categories. 1. Visualisation: Visualise the three-dimensional representation of geospatial information and data analysis results for easy understanding.
2. Intuition: Intuitively acquire information or knowledge with the help of digitisation without a complex reasoning process.
3. Data synchronisation: Increase productivity by providing real-time synchronisation of related data.
4. Extract value and knowledge from information: Provide information with engineering value to users and contribute to rapid and reliable decision-making.
5. Sustainable use and practice: A usability-based platform that practitioners can continuously and conveniently use in their actual work. Park and You introduced a digital twin water management platform, ‘K-Twin SJ’, for the entire 173km long Sumjin River basin in South Korea. It was designed in May 2021 and finished in December 2022. User services began in April 2023 for internal customers at Korea Water Resources Corporation in the Republic of Korea. The project includes high-precision 3D geospatial information on the whole watershed, real-time water management data visualisation, flood analysis simulation, AI dam operation optimisation, AI slope geometry generation, levee safety evaluation, AI CCTV image analysis, simpler flooding potential prediction, and an advanced drone monitoring system. To create 3D geospatial information, high-resolution helicopter LiDAR mapping was conducted for the river. Reality modelling by drone photogrammetry and 3D data reduction was performed for three dams, 85 river bridges, and three weirs.
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