Digital Twins: Initiatives, Technologies, and Use Cases in the Arab World

Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Digital twins (DTs) are virtual replicas of components, assets, systems, or processes, linked to their real-world counterparts, continuously updating their states and simulating their behavior in real-time, as illustrated in Figure 1 . They are adopted for monitoring, predicting, and optimizing the performance of diverse systems, bridging the gap between design, testing and deployment. Significant efforts are being devoted across Arab R&D institutions to export technology tackling challenges that are not only pertinent to the region, but also of global importance, e.g., energy, sustainability, disaster management, healthcare, and urbanization, among many others. For instance, Khalifa University, UAE, is pioneering research into optical wireless communication using DTs.