Digital Innovation Center of Excellence (DICE)
MEGAPROJECTS AND DIGITAL ENGINEERING
In the world of industry and research, megaprojects are the ambitious efforts that can change the world, e.g., space exploration technology, defense systems, power plants, complex buildings. The benefits of such projects are enormous, but undetected design errors and unforeseen production issues can cascade into delays that put a project behind schedule and over budget.
Digital engineering (DE) helps prevent such calamities. By using artificial intelligence and the latest data models to coordinate engineering and construction, DE keeps costs down and work on track while dramatically reducing overall program risk.
Out of this emerged DICE – the Digital Innovation Center of Excellence. DICE serves to design next generation power and energy systems with digital engineering principals through the Water Power Office, National Reactor Innovation Center, Versatile Test Reactor, and National Nuclear Security Administration.
What is DICE?
DICE serves as a virtual center to formalize and coordinate digital engineering, digital twinning, and digital transformation activities across next generation energy systems. DICE will serve the following key functions:
Leadership for a strategy on digital innovation for the world’s energy future
Recognition as a national center of excellence through research accomplishments
Coordination to share community best practices across the laboratory
Outreach to universities, industry partners, and other national laboratories
Enhance training and education materials on digital engineering and digital twinning
Examples of Success
Mortenson Construction cumulative day direct schedule reductions
%
Boeing improvements in first-time quality through use of Digital Twins
General Electric savings in cost avoidance through digital innovations
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in savings through digital innovations
DICE Pillars
DICE is organized into eight key pillar areas with tight collaboration between pillars to realize our digital future. Each pillar will meet at least quarterly with event-based (proposal opportunities / standards development) meetings arranged between regularly scheduled meetings.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) in energy systems has a game-changing potential in automating expensive and manual human activities. AI focuses on emerging architectures, methodologies, and tools that will drive revolutionary advancements in scientific applications.
Instrumentation and Controls
An essential component of digital innovation. The integration of Intstumentation and Controls technologies in the development of Digital Twins for modern industrial applications is a key element of digital innovation.
Practice and Culture
The practice/culture is the realization of digital innovation and digital engineering within our national laboratory system, industry, and academic partners.
Digital Twin
Digital twins are the computational simulation of a physical process or system that has a live link to the physical system, enabling enhanced verification of the simulation, control of the physical system, and analysis of trends via artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Digital Thread
The digital thread is defined as integrating systems and data together to trace connections in data across data sources and across the lifecycle of a program or asset. The result of this effort is a holistic view that empowers new insights and prevents losses caused by siloed data.
Decision Science, Visualization and Human Computer Interaction
Using behavioral economics, game theory, statistics, and risk analysis to develop models and simulations that shed light on how human behavior affect decisions.
Cyber & Data Resilience
Data resilience represents the safeguards and validation of integrity with data which is utilized in the training of machine learning models.
Computing Platforms
Computing platforms represent the computational architectures with the right-sized deployments of high performance computing, public/community cloud, and edge device computing.