Using Digital Twin Technology to Ensure Data Quality in Transport Systems

Autonomous transport systems are dependent on real-time data from their environment. The data is read from a multitude of sensors ranging from sensors measuring temperature, pressure, and flow to advanced sensor systems such as GPS and Lidar systems. When the sensor data is used as input to an automation system, measurement errors and sensor faults may lead to invalid situation awareness or even catastrophic failure.
Digital Twins (DTs) are digital representations of a physical systems, where the physical rules of a system are expressed in a mathematical form. When feeding sensor data to the DT, sensor values can be checked against the rules of the physical system. This enables feasibility checking of sensor values, and together with sensor redundancy, faulty measurements can be corrected.
In this paper, we present the DT for a marine vessel energy subsystem and use the DT for validating and cleansing of representative data for that subsystem.