Leveraging Digital Twins for Smart Hydropower: A Pathway to Industry 4.0

The convergence of Industry 4.0 and digitalization efforts is fueling a surge in industrial digital transformation, with a particular focus on integrating Digital Twins (DTs) to automate and virtualize control systems. The overarching goal is to continuously optimize the underlying cyber-physical systems, thereby enhancing sustainability across various domains. The data-driven concept of DTs pushes towards the creation of a virtual replica of a physical object, which in our case is a power plant. The resulting software counterpart mirrors the real object’s key properties and behaviors within a specific application. The common target is to leverage DTs for earlier and more comprehensive product and project validation, enabling pre-delivery testing of functionalities previously limited to on-site checks, thus boosting quality and productivity and enabling post-commissioning and life-cycle management. Our specific aim is to enable knowledge transfer between operations and maintenance of the power plant and the product and project development processes. To that aim, our survey informs of current digital-twin practices in the context of hydropower plants. The outcomes are the basis for further research in the field to materialize the promising benefits (e.g., efficiency improvement, anomaly detection, etc.) for the design and operation of hydropower installations.