DesCartes Builder: A Tool to Develop Machine-Learning Based Digital Twins

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: de Conto, Eduardo, Genest, Blaise, Easwaran, Arvind, Ng, Nicholas, Menon, Shweta
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866911120815554560
author de Conto, Eduardo
Genest, Blaise
Easwaran, Arvind
Ng, Nicholas
Menon, Shweta
author_facet de Conto, Eduardo
Genest, Blaise
Easwaran, Arvind
Ng, Nicholas
Menon, Shweta
contents Digital twins (DTs) are increasingly utilized to monitor, manage, and optimize complex systems across various domains, including civil engineering. A core requirement for an effective DT is to act as a fast, accurate, and maintainable surrogate of its physical counterpart, the physical twin (PT). To this end, machine learning (ML) is frequently employed to (i) construct real-time DT prototypes using efficient reduced-order models (ROMs) derived from high-fidelity simulations of the PT's nominal behavior, and (ii) specialize these prototypes into DT instances by leveraging historical sensor data from the target PT. Despite the broad applicability of ML, its use in DT engineering remains largely ad hoc. Indeed, while conventional ML pipelines often train a single model for a specific task, DTs typically require multiple, task- and domain-dependent models. Thus, a more structured approach is required to design DTs. In this paper, we introduce DesCartes Builder, an open-source tool to enable the systematic engineering of ML-based pipelines for real-time DT prototypes and DT instances. The tool leverages an open and flexible visual data flow paradigm to facilitate the specification, composition, and reuse of ML models. It also integrates a library of parameterizable core operations and ML algorithms tailored for DT design. We demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of DesCartes Builder through a civil engineering use case involving the design of a real-time DT prototype to predict the plastic strain of a structure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_17988
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DesCartes Builder: A Tool to Develop Machine-Learning Based Digital Twins
de Conto, Eduardo
Genest, Blaise
Easwaran, Arvind
Ng, Nicholas
Menon, Shweta
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Digital twins (DTs) are increasingly utilized to monitor, manage, and optimize complex systems across various domains, including civil engineering. A core requirement for an effective DT is to act as a fast, accurate, and maintainable surrogate of its physical counterpart, the physical twin (PT). To this end, machine learning (ML) is frequently employed to (i) construct real-time DT prototypes using efficient reduced-order models (ROMs) derived from high-fidelity simulations of the PT's nominal behavior, and (ii) specialize these prototypes into DT instances by leveraging historical sensor data from the target PT. Despite the broad applicability of ML, its use in DT engineering remains largely ad hoc. Indeed, while conventional ML pipelines often train a single model for a specific task, DTs typically require multiple, task- and domain-dependent models. Thus, a more structured approach is required to design DTs. In this paper, we introduce DesCartes Builder, an open-source tool to enable the systematic engineering of ML-based pipelines for real-time DT prototypes and DT instances. The tool leverages an open and flexible visual data flow paradigm to facilitate the specification, composition, and reuse of ML models. It also integrates a library of parameterizable core operations and ML algorithms tailored for DT design. We demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of DesCartes Builder through a civil engineering use case involving the design of a real-time DT prototype to predict the plastic strain of a structure.
title DesCartes Builder: A Tool to Develop Machine-Learning Based Digital Twins
topic Software Engineering
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17988