J-Park Simulator

A Part of The World Avatar Project: A knowledge-graph-based digital twin of the world

Starting in 2013, researchers at CARES, the Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore, started work on the World Avatar project. The idea behind the project is to connect data and computational agents to create a living digital “avatar” of the real world. The digital world is intended to be “living” in the sense that the computational agents will, amongst other things, incorporate real-time data such that the digital world remains up to date and that analyses based on the data remain self-consistent. The name “World Avatar” seeks to convey the possibility of representing every aspect of the real world, extending the idea of digital twins to consider the possibility of representing any abstract concept or process. The initial focus of the research at CARES was the decarbonization of the chemical industry in Singapore. This resulted in the development of the J-Park Simulator, which uses technologies from the Semantic Web to create a knowledge-graph-based digital twin of the eco-industrial park on Jurong Island. The scope of the World Avatar project has since broadened considerably. For example, it has demonstrated the use of ontologies to facilitate interoperability between models and data from different technical domains, developed an agent discovery and composition service to allow agents to be combined to perform more complex tasks, developed a blockchain-based smart contract system to enable an agent marketplace, and demonstrated a parallel world framework for scenario analysis.