Digital twins and natural disasters: The AI tech giving emergency response a boost

Digital twins may not be a new technology, but the AI boom and a flurry of fresh research means they're now at the centre of a life-saving industry and improving our response to natural disasters.

Just in the last eight months, researchers have explored how they can be used to plan and monitor flooding and earthquakes in Turkey, Korea, and China.  

The technology can be traced back to NASA’s Apollo missions in the 1960s and reached its current form of virtual simulations in the 2010s, but advances in AI have accelerated the tech even further since 2020.

The landmark Virtual Singapore DT has been used to test emergency response strategies for over a decade, and the UK government’s National Digital Twin Programme (NDTP) is developing a model to predict cascading asset failures. In January, the EU opened grant applications for early warning projects using DTs.

UCL Associate Professor Saman Ghaffarian is at the cutting edge of this research. In his proposal for a “digital risk twin” (DRT) model in npj’s Natural Hazards journal, he explains: “DRTs provide real-time data-driven insights but prioritise a collaborative, multi-step implementation process over immediate automation.

“This flexibility in handling data and applying insights makes DRTs particularly effective for complex, dynamic systems such as disaster risk management.”