PhD Studentship: In Digital Twinning of Civil Infrastructure - Development of Cognitive Digital Twins for Managing Urban Infrastructure as Socio-technical Systems

Award Summary

100% of home tuition fees paid and annual living expenses of £17,668 (2022/23 UKRI rate).

Overview

As an emerging concept, digital twins have been extensively explored to create up-to-date virtual counterparts of physical assets (e.g., roads, bridges, buildings), mirroring, analysing, optimising, and predicting asset performance. Real-time data is the key to achieving the convergence between physical and cyberspace. Leveraging backbone digital technologies, the value from data is unleashed following the Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom (DIKW) Pyramid.

However, the adoption of digital twins in managing urban buildings and infrastructure faces major challenges. As socio-technical systems, the complexity and uncertainty of infrastructure systems stem from the interactions and interdependencies between a diverse range of social, technical, and contextual elements in and around the system. Live data alone, cannot completely explain and forecast the complex behaviour of such systems.

This project focuses on developing a cognitive digital twin framework based on semantic modelling and ontologies, which can effectively and efficiently exploit implicit knowledge from domain expertise and public knowledge bases. This project will empower the established infrastructure digital twin with cognition capabilities, meaning it can perform human-like intelligent activities such as attention, perception, comprehension, memory, reasoning, prediction, decision-making, and most interestingly evolution with accumulated data and knowledge. The development will be of use to wider areas, including decision-making for promoting infrastructure resilience and net zero. 

Number Of Awards

One

Start Date

18th September 2023

Award Duration

3 Years

Application Closing Date

15th April 2023

Sponsor

Newcastle University

Supervisors

Dr Xiang Xie, Prof Mohamad Kassem, Prof Philp James

Eligibility Criteria

You must have, or expect to gain, a minimum 2:1 Honours degree or international equivalent in a relevant subject or subject relevant to the proposed PhD project (e.g., civil engineering, information engineering, computing, mathematics, etc.). Enthusiasm for research, the ability to think and work independently, excellent analytical skills and strong verbal and written communication skills are also essential requirements. A demonstratable interest in one of the following areas is desirable: Building Information Modelling (BIM), Geographic Information System (GIS), knowledge graph for knowledge management, coding and programming.

Home and international applicants (inc. EU) are welcome to apply and if successful will receive a full studentship. Applicants whose first language is not English require an IELTS score of 6.5 overall with a minimum of 5.5 in all sub-skills.

International applicants may require an ATAS (Academic Technology Approval Scheme) clearance certificate prior to obtaining their visa and to study on this programme. 

How To Apply

You must apply through the University’s Apply to Newcastle Portal 

Once registered select ‘Create a Postgraduate Application’.  

Use ‘Course Search’ to identify your programme of study:  

• search for the ‘Course Title’ using the programme code: 8040F
• Research Area: Civil Engineering (Structural)
• select 'PhD Civil Engineering (full time) - Civil Engineering (Structural)’ as the programme of study 

You will then need to provide the following information in the ‘Further Questions’ section:  

• the studentship code ENG110 in the ‘Studentship/Partnership Reference’ field  
• when prompted for how you are providing your research proposal - select ‘Write Proposal’. You should then type in the title of the research project from this advert – and provide your own statement. 

Contact Details

Please contact Dr Xiang Xie xiang.xie@newcastle.ac.uk

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