Digital Twin-Driven Human-Centered Design Frameworks for Meeting Sustainability Objectives

Abstract

This paper presents a manifesto for the future design of human-made systems and engage this reflection by promoting a computational human factors engineering (HFE) approach. In this paper, we concentrate on the fact that human well-being and sustainability objectives are inseparable. Thus, this paper's primary focus is to demonstrate a simulation-based computational design methodology, Digital Human-in-the-loop (D-HIL), which utilizes the Digital Human Modeling (DHM) platform to inject HFE design principles early in design. The D-HIL framework enables human, product, and systems data to be coupled with computational toolkits; thus, bringing opportunities for facilitating ergonomics decision-making to be part of the Digital Twin driven design. We presented two frameworks originating from our recent work in D-HIL research: (1) Prototyping Toolbox and (2) Human Error and Functional Failure Reasoning (HEFFR) as means for realizing sustainability goals through Digital Twin-based design. While our preliminary studies show that both tools show promise in terms of realizing the sustainability goals, they are limited to only goals that relate to cost. In our future work, we plan to explore models and computational tools from non-traditional engineering domains to expand our frameworks' scope to realizing sustainability goals that go beyond the cost estimations.

Can we benefit from game engines to develop digital twins for planning the deployment of photovoltaics?

“…Artificial Intelligence (AI) is commonly used to construct DTs and is used for predicting, detecting, making decisions, planning and diagnosing. The most common AI methods include machine learning (Vrabič et al 2021;D' Amico et al 2019;La Russa and Santagati 2020;Darvishi et al 2021;Demirel et al 2021;Greis et al 2021;Zohdi 2020;Hafez 2020;Min et al 2019), neural networks (Vrabič et al 2021;Mourtzis et al 2021;Wu and Li 2021) and genetic algorithms (Viola and Chen 2020;Negri et al 2019Negri et al , 2021Zohdi 2021a). Software engineering methods are mainly applied to specify functional requirements and document the DT's structure and behaviour.…”

A unified view of a human digital twin

“…Four additional papers focused on health and fitness applications, primarily for sports training. The remaining papers appeared to uniquely address five additional application areas, including general product design (Demirel et al 2021), military application (Li et al 2020), disaster management (Fan et al 2021), organization design (Parmar et al 2020, and identity management (Zibuschka et al 2020).…”

“…Recently, this term has been extended to humans using the term "human digital twin." This term has been applied in diverse fields, including medicine (Chakshu et al 2019;Corral-Acero et al 2020;Hirschvogel et al 2019;Liu et al 2019;Lutze 2020), sports performance (Barricelli et al 2020), manufacturing ergonomics (Caputo et al 2019;Greco et al 2020;Sharotry et al 2020), and product design (Demirel et al 2021) (Constantinescu et al 2019;Demirel et al 2021). Although the human digital twin concept may be analogous to digital twins of products, there are distinct differences, including increased underlying variability between humans and the fact that humans often employ products to achieve their goals.…”

The EmpathiCH Workshop: Unraveling Empathy-Centric Design

“…Designing user-centered solutions and technologies to address societal problems requires understanding people's needs (e.g., control, safety [11]), values (e.g., inclusiveness, ethics [28]), and experiences. Design research considers empathy a crucial factor in better understanding people [33] and safeguarding the success of user-centered approaches [5,43].…”