Digital Twins: Merely a Catch Phrase or a Requirement for the Future?
Keywords: Agent-Based Model, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Digital Twin, General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU), Individual-Based Model, Megacity, Modeling and Simulation, Multi-Agent System, Normative Model, Positive Model
Abstract: Recently, there has been an increase in digital twin research. However, we would argue little attention has been paid to representing scalable, explicitly detailed models of human populations within digital twin habitations. This paper will argue that if we continue to use only well-known modeling paradigms and trusted software architectures to build digital twin social simulations of human habitations, we may not be able to answer societal questions that could arise in the future. A future where we may well have need to simulate human habitation across all population scales. In outline, this paper will ask a series of leading questions regarding considerations of what might be required to simulate highly realistic human-like agents within scalable, parameterizable, simulated spatial environments representative of any human habitation whose size may range from a small village to a megacity. The purpose of this position paper is first to submit a series of questions to our colleagues in the simulation community. But second, to serve as an outline for academic and technological argument wherein such argument may lead to the invention of an improved, possibly novel, positive and normative, generative agent-based modeling and simulation technology.