The Role of Uncertainty Propagation for Digital Twins

The great demand for digital maintenance concepts for bridges has given an enormous boost to research in the field of digital twins. The many areas of application of the digital twin include the planning of maintenance measures as well as the prediction of future damage and life cycle management. The correct quantification of uncertainties in the underlying model plays an enormous role both in decision-making and in the acceptance of the concept by practitioners. The article provides an overview of current developments in digitalization in civil engineering and shows the application of the Monte Carlo method to determine uncertainties in the predictions using the digital twin. The theoretical explanations are underpinned using the example of a mid-span slab bridge. A non-parametric method is presented to monitor the convergence of the resulting probability distributions in order to determine the accuracy of the estimation and to minimize the computational effort.