Rigorous Model-Constrained Scientific Machine Learning for Digital Twins: A Computational Mathematics Perspective

Overview

Digital twins (DTs) are high-fidelity virtual representations of physical systems and processes. At their foundation lie mathematical and physical models that describe system behavior across multiple spatial and temporal scales. A central purpose of DTs is to enable “what-if” analyses through hypothetical simulations, supporting lifecycle monitoring, parameter calibration against observational data, and systematic uncertainty quantification (UQ). For DTs to serve as a reliable basis for real-time forecasting, optimization, and decision-making, they must reconcile two traditionally competing requirements: mathematical rigor and physical fidelity, and computational efficiency at scale. This has motivated a new generation of approaches that combine classical tools from numerical analysis, partial differential equations, inverse problems, and optimization with the expressive power of Scientific Machine Learning (SciML). In this talk, I will outline a principled pathway from traditional computational mathematics to rigorously grounded SciML. I will then present recent Scientific Deep Learning (SciDL) methods for forward modeling, inverse and calibration problems, and uncertainty quantification, emphasizing mathematical structure, stability, and generalization. Both theoretical results and numerical demonstrations will be shown for representative problems governed by transport, heat, Burgers, Euler (including transonic and hypersonic regimes), and Navier–Stokes equations.