Abstract
Operators of safety-critical industrial processes increasingly rely on digital twins to screen control interventions, but such simulators rarely carry certified safety guarantees. Wastewater treatment plants exemplify the gap: operators face a daily safety-efficiency trade-off where aerating too little risks effluent violations and nitrous-oxide (N2O) spikes, and aerating too much wastes energy. We develop an explainable digital twin for aeration and dosing setpoints. CCSS-IX, the simulator, is a bank of interpretable locally linear state-space "experts" adaptively mixed by a context-aware gating network, building on a continuous-time regime-switching scaffold. A runtime decision layer applies conformal risk control to abstain, reopen, or return a falsifying temporal witness for any operator-proposed action that cannot be statistically certified. The artificial-intelligence contribution is twofold: an identifiable, context-conditioned structured surrogate that retains operator-readable dynamics, and a self-falsifying decision rule with finite-sample coverage guarantees. The engineering contribution is a validated, end-to-end decision-support pipeline, tested on a 1000-step slice of the Avedøre full-scale plant (42.6% sensor missingness, 2-minute sampling), the Agtrup/BlueKolding full-scale plant in Denmark, and the Benchmark Simulation Model No. 2 (BSM2) international benchmark, under a matched ten-seed protocol. The static structured ensemble lies within 0.78% root-mean-square error of an unconstrained black-box reference, and the adaptive variant within 1.08%. The calibrated reopen rule cuts aggregate two-plant regret by 43.6% at an unsafe-action cost weight of 4 and eliminates unsafe chosen actions on the BSM2 main slice. Event-aligned temporal witnesses prevent 93 of 187 false-safe N2O approvals, about 4.65x the dyadic baseline (paired McNemar p < 1e-21).
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Apr 22, 2026cs.LG
Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) need digital-twin-style decision support tools that can simulate plant response under prescribed control plans, tolerate irregular and missing sensing, and remain informative over 12-36 h planning horizons. Meeting these requirements with full-scale plant data remains an open engineering-AI challenge. We present CCSS-RS, a controlled continuous-time state-space model that separates historical state inference from future control and exogenous rollout. The model combines typed context encoding, gain-weighted forcing of prescribed and forecast drivers, semigroup-consistent rollouts, and Student-t plus hurdle outputs for heavy-tailed and zero-inflated WWTP sensor data. On the public Avedøre full-scale benchmark, with 906,815 timesteps, 43% missingness, and 1-20 min irregular sampling, CCSS-RS achieves RMSE 0.696 and CRPS 0.349 at H=1000 across 10,000 test windows. This reduces RMSE by 40-46% relative to Neural CDE baselines and by 31-35% relative to simplified internal variants. Four case studies using a frozen checkpoint on test data demonstrate operational value: oxygen-setpoint perturbations shift predicted ammonium by -2.3 to +1.4 over horizons 300-1000; a smoothed setpoint plan ranks first in multi-criterion screening; context-only sensor outages raise monitored-variable RMSE by at most 10%; and ammonium, nitrate, and oxygen remain more accurate than persistence throughout the rollout. These results establish CCSS-RS as a practical learned simulator for offline scenario screening in industrial wastewater treatment, complementary to mechanistic models.
Gary Simethy, Daniel Ortiz Arroyo, Petar Durdevic
Aug 31, 2026cs.CE
Digital twin technologies have the potential to improve operational flexibility and responsiveness capabilities of nuclear systems. To provide decision support, cyber event characterization, state estimation, predictive control, and real-time dynamic processing of operational data, however, an efficient digital twin needs to integrate multiple models (data-driven as well as physics-based) with explainability while at the same time maintain two-way synchronization with the physical facility at a time constant less than its operational cycle. In this work, we present the Purdue University Reactor One Digital Twin (PUR-1 DT), a cyber-physical digital twin with a complete high-fidelity physics-based and AI-driven virtual model stack (neutronics, thermal-hydraulics, point kinetics) which provides closed-loop explainable diagnostics, forecasting, predictive control, and action recommendation back to the reactor via two-way communications and a cyber-physical testbed. We demonstrate real-time synchronized state estimation and short-term forecasting over a full reactor operational cycle and conduct a series of benchmarking experiments to validate accuracy and latency. Our results show good agreement with experimental results and lay the groundwork for further development and experimental demonstration of DT-enabled functionalities in real-world facilities.
Vasileios Theos, Jonah Lau, Konstantinos Gkouliaras +7
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG
Digital Twins rely on surrogate models to mirror physical systems in real time, yet these models can degrade as operating conditions evolve, a phenomenon known as concept drift. Maintaining surrogate fidelity under drift, particularly when models must also capture aleatoric uncertainty, remains an open challenge. Existing adaptive frameworks lack principled mechanisms for detecting when updates are needed, for efficiently adapting models from limited streaming data, and for certifying that updates genuinely improve predictive performance. Here we present an adaptive Digital Twin framework that integrates a Fisher score--based multivariate drift detector, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient continual learning, and a Mann--Whitney
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Yi-Ping Chen, Ying-Kuan Tsai, Vispi Karkaria +3