Head of the networking and communications group at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), Ion Turcanu shares his views on the development and applications of digital twins and the impact they could have in Luxembourg.
Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical environments that integrate AI and mathematical modelling with real-world data to mirror that physical world. The concept was pioneered by NASA in the 1960s, with the 1970 Apollo 13 mission being its first major application.
At LIST, digital twin concepts are being applied across a wide range of themes, from pollution and energy to mobility, which support areas like optimisation of infrastructure, climate energy and more, thereby helping to position the Grand Duchy as a testbed for such innovation.
BISTWIN project
One such project was BISTWIN, with LIST’s Ion Turcanu as coordinator, which recently concluded. BISTWIN created a virtual model focused on the “Um Rouscht” industrial zone in Bissen, which hosts over 60 companies and some 2,500 workers. The goal was to allow planners and mobility managers to predict and simulate traffic, assess impacts on infrastructure, and support decision-making through data-driven evidence. The project received support from the Luxembourg economy ministry, with contributions from the Municipality of Bissen, intobyte, Schroeder & Associates, and Emile Weber.
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“We started with creating the mobility digital twin, a digital replica of mobility in the area, with the goal of mid- and long-term planning, to aid the municipality to plan ahead any kinds of infrastructure changes, such as building new office spaces [which means] people coming to work in that area,” Turcanu says.
One of the concerns the municipality had, for instance, was the possible traffic congestion to additional office spaces in the area, given the fact that there was just one entry point from the N7 road. BISTWIN could therefore simulate and model on a micro-mobility level the traffic conditions and at what point it might reach a threshold with bottlenecks.
“Another issue is that the area itself is not very well covered by the public transportation system, so we wanted first to understand the gaps [there] and test a new mobility service that could cover the entire industrial zone to encourage people to take public transportation, reduce travel time, stress, without adding congestion,” Turcanu adds.
As a result, the team defined a new e-shuttle service and schedule proposal that could connect the Mersch train station with the Bissen industrial zone in a way that made sense for commuters. “Through this digital twin, in a digital sandbox without implementing the service in reality, we simulated a new route for this electric bus using the characteristics of an actual electric shuttle to see, for instance, whether we’d manage to keep the schedule, considering the existing traffic situation, how big the fleet would need to be, what the battery consumption would need to be during the day to cover one day of service.”
Commitment to innovation
According to LIST, BISTWIN’s “next step is to integrate energy, environmental, and social dimensions into the twin—creating a holistic platform for future regional development.”
Meanwhile, Turcanu is also involved with the LIST-led €4 million Horizon Europe-funded 6G-TWIN project, on which Sébastien Faye, LIST head of distributed & intelligent connectivity group, is the main coordinator. The project brings together 11 partners from seven countries and aims to fully integrate network digital twins into mobile networks of the next generation. According to LIST, the potential impact is wide and “could eventually support smart cities, autonomous mobility, industrial automation, and climate-neutral data centres—all key priorities for the European Green Deal and Digital Decade.”
This puts LIST, and Luxembourg, right at the heart of this impact, thereby “strengthening [the country’s] digital innovation ecosystem and supporting research, industry and public policy needs,” per the institution. With 840 collaborators from some 60 countries, LIST sees itself as helping to position “Luxembourg as a testbed for large-scale digital twin innovation and cross-sector impact.”
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“The whole idea of having these digital twin technologies is to test these what-if scenarios before applying them in reality,” Turcanu says, adding: “The biggest challenge in the upcoming years will be to integrate multidisciplinary digital twins to make them solve specific goals.”
