Course content

To face the increasing complexity of technical systems, the different engineering disciplines have virtualized their content to a large extent: each industrial system comes now with hundreds if not thousands of models. These models are used not only in the design phase of systems, but also for their operation and even for their decommissioning.

This course is about so-called systemic digital twins, i.e. models of complex technical and socio-technical systems that aim at taking informed and justified decisions regarding strategic assets of these systems.

Learning outcome

The course provides an in-depth introduction to modeling and simulation of complex technical and socio-technical systems. It presents the theoretical foundations of this discipline, stemmed from system dynamics and model-based systems engineering. It relies on the state-of-the-art modeling language Sigma and the modeling environment WorldLab to design concrete models. The overall objective is to give students a solid background in the design and the use of systemic digital twins of complex systems.

Learning methods and activities

The course is organized as a series of seminars. Aside attending seminars, students will be assigned an individual homework. This homework consists in studying a (reasonable size) use case, designing a model for that use case, performing experiments on that model and reporting the results of these experiments in form of a small scientific article. The use case will be preferably related to their PhD subject.

Recommended previous knowledge

Some knowledge of programming is useful.

Required previous knowledge

All students taking this course must be enrolled in a PhD program at NTNU or a different university.

Course materials

The course relies for the most part on the Sigma book (by Antoine Rauzy), but it may be completed by slides, articles and books.