Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Digital Twins in Engineering and Medicine

规划资助：工程与医学数字孪生工程研究中心

• 批准号: 1937129
• 负责人: Charbel Farhat
• 金额: $ 10万
• 依托单位: Stanford University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-09-01 至 2021-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1937129&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Planning; Grant; Engineering; Research; Center

Decisions are made every day about medical procedures such as surgeries or drug treatments: they affect and condition the future of patients. They are based on established best practices, but do not necessarily account for the individual traits of a person. A similar decision-making process can be found in complex engineering systems, or the maintenance schedule of an aircraft. During the last decade however,it has been recognized that the transition to personalized medicine will potentially enhance the life of patients and increase the quality of clinical care, as well as potentially lower the overall healthcare costs. A similar observation has been made regarding complex engineering systems, with a call to develop cyber-physical systems and dynamic data processes that use massive amounts of data to drive individual smart machines. The practical realization of this transition requires 1) the development of a new technology for extracting meaningful information from data and interpreting it correctly, 2) an accompanying plan for educating the future workforce in this global area, and 3) the identification and resolution of the associated ethical and privacy issues. This planning grant will develop the vision for the proposed Center to influence this transformation during the next two decades by influencing the health monitoring and decision-making processes of living and non-living physical entities in these important areas using digital twins. These are digital replicas of living and non-living physical entities. Their underlying concept integrates artificial intelligence, machine learning, and software analytics with physics-based modeling. Their main purpose is to act as living digital simulation models that are continuously trained and updated to be able to mirror the states and behaviors of their physical counterparts.This grant will focus on planning the development of a Center that will integrate research groups working on core technologies for digital twins, such as algorithms, hardware, software,physics-based machine learning, and mathematics and statistics, with counterparts working on three significantly different application areas: aircraft health monitoring; customized weight loss programs; and qualification of metal 3D printed parts. This integration will define the common requirements for digital twins, advance these application areas and explore their societal and ethical implications. This will establish a multi-disciplinary dialog between mathematicians, engineers, medical doctors, lawyers and philosophers, and a convergent vision for how to shape the future of this technology. The grant will enable an Exploratory Workshop that will serve to identify the broad stakeholder community in academia and the corporate world and government, form the team and management structure, and most importantly, define a multi-disciplinary, convergent vision for a future Engineering Research Center in Digital Twins for Engineering and Medicine. The dialog that this planning grant will foster on the subjects of digital twins, engineering workforce development, diversity and culture of inclusion, and innovation ecosystem will build new connections between a diverse group of researchers and practitioners from different institutions and disciplines and identify the potential members of the Center. Additionally, explicit efforts are planned to engage partners from institutions that serve primarily underrepresented minorities in the activities of this planning grant. The impact of the newly formed connections with a shared interest in digital twins, in line with the idea of fostering a convergent research, has the potential to spring other areas of collaboration in the future.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

每天都会做出有关手术或药物治疗等医疗程序的决定：它们影响并决定患者的未来。它们基于既定的最佳实践，但不一定考虑到一个人的个人特征。在复杂的工程系统或飞机的维护计划中也可以找到类似的决策过程。然而，在过去十年中，人们认识到向个性化医疗的过渡将有可能改善患者的生活并提高临床护理质量，并有可能降低总体医疗保健成本。对于复杂的工程系统也进行了类似的观察，呼吁开发网络物理系统和动态数据处理，使用大量数据来驱动单个智能机器。这一转变的实际实现需要 1) 开发一种新技术，从数据中提取有意义的信息并正确解释它，2) 制定一个在全球范围内教育未来劳动力的配套计划，以及 3) 识别和解决问题相关的道德和隐私问题。这笔规划拨款将为拟议中心制定愿景，通过使用数字孪生影响这些重要领域的生物和非生物物理实体的健康监测和决策过程，从而在未来二十年影响这一转变。这些是生命和非生命物理实体的数字复制品。他们的基本概念将人工智能、机器学习、软件分析与基于物理的建模相结合。它们的主要目的是充当活的数字模拟模型，不断地训练和更新，以便能够反映其物理对应物的状态和行为。这笔赠款将重点用于规划一个中心的发展，该中心将整合从事核心研究的研究小组数字孪生技术，例如算法、硬件、软件、基于物理的机器学习以及数学和统计，同行们致力于三个截然不同的应用领域：飞机健康监测；定制减肥计划；金属 3D 打印零件的鉴定。这种集成将定义数字孪生的共同要求，推进这些应用领域并探索其社会和道德影响。这将在数​​学家、工程师、医生、律师和哲学家之间建立多学科对话，并就如何塑造这项技术的未来达成一致的愿景。这笔赠款将举办一个探索性研讨会，该研讨会将确定学术界、企业界和政府中广泛的利益相关者群体，组建团队和管理结构，最重要的是，为未来的工程研究中心定义多学科、融合的愿景工程和医学数字双胞胎。该规划拨款将促进关于数字孪生、工程劳动力发展、多样性和包容性文化以及创新生态系统等主题的对话，将在来自不同机构和学科的多元化研究人员和从业者之间建立新的联系，并确定潜在成员中心的。此外，还计划明确努力让主要为代表性不足的少数群体服务的机构的合作伙伴参与这项规划赠款的活动。新建立的联系与对数字孪生的共同兴趣所产生的影响，符合促进融合研究的理念，有可能在未来催生其他领域的合作。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并被认为是值得的通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来获得支持。