On mitigating the opacity of digital twins

Digital twins, or variants thereof, are becoming ubiquitous across many disciplines of engineering computational modeling and simulation. Despite the increased use of this concept, industrial practitioners and academic researchers alike lack consensus as to what exactly constitutes a digital twin, much less how one might quantify associated uncertainties to support the verification, validation, and ultimately credibility assessment thereof. Furthermore, the complexities involved in modeling structural vibration and acoustics can exacerbate the epistemic uncertainties of this opaque portrait. We therefore posit that use of goal structured notation in the context of a credibility assessment framework provides one viable means by which key stakeholders in both the development and deployment of digital twins can collectively work towards increased clarity. One can expect that achieving greater clarity for requirements of digital twins, particularly those of phenomenological relevance to structural dynamics and acoustics, computational, experimental, and operational disciplines can more optimally combine to achieve desired engineering outcomes.