Introductory Courses on Digital Twins: an Experience Report

TL;DR

The paper investigates how to educate DT engineers across diverse backgrounds by detailing two pilot courses: a multidisciplinary Newcastle module focused on water infrastructure awareness and evaluation, and a technically oriented Aarhus course on DT construction and deployment. It documents objectives, content, delivery, and experiential insights, emphasizing the importance of establishing common skill baselines to bridge varying expertise. The comparison reveals complementary strengths—conceptual evaluation versus hands-on engineering—and yields practical recommendations on prerequisites, group composition, and case-study maturity. The authors advocate creating a shared repository of teaching materials to scale DT engineering education across institutions.

Abstract

We describe and compare two new courses on model-based approaches to the engineering of Digital Twins. One course was delivered to doctoral students from a range of largely non-computational backgrounds, and the other to Masters students with computing experience. We describe the goals, content and delivery of the courses, and review experience gained to date. Key lessons focus on the importance of providing common baselines for participants coming from diverse technical backgrounds.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: CEG8529 Week 1 Schedule
• Figure 2: AU course 14 week schedule