CSIC Research Talk

'Building-integrated agriculture: towards a digital twin for improving crop yield'  Rebecca Ward

Abstract:
‘Digital twinning’ is a much-used expression that can generate conflicting interpretations across different fields.  But the original vision – of a virtual representation that could be used to aid understanding of the relationship between a physical system and its underlying information – underpins the essence of what a digital twin should be.  As part of a long-running collaboration between the Energy Efficient Cities initiative at the Cambridge University Engineering Department, the Alan Turing Institute and Zero Carbon Farms, a digital twin of the Growing Underground farm is being developed.  The CROP (Crop Research Observation Platform) web application brings together several streams of research related to monitoring of environmental conditions, data visualisation and simulation into a single platform that potentially offers the growers an efficient means to monitor growing conditions in the farm and explore future operational scenarios.   In this talk the development of the digital twin from the underlying different research streams will be presented and the potential benefits of such an approach will be explored.