Franco Ongaro, Leonardo’s chief technology and innovation officer, will be at ITWeek on 30 September at 11:00 in Sala Fucine
A mantra, rightly repeated by environmentalists, says: “There is no Planet B”. The solution to the climate crisis and global warming will not be finding a new world to move to. But in reality a “Planet B” exists, it is made of bits, we are composing it with big data. He lives inside the most powerful computers, such as Leonardo’s Da Vinci 1, in Genoa. Satellites, every single day, like miners, extract data from Earth observation for hundreds of Terabytes to compose, frame by frame, the digital twin of our Planet as it changes and evolves.
“A digital twin is a virtual model of something real – he explains Franco Ongaro, Leonardo’s chief technology and innovation officer, the most important Italian company in the defense and aerospace sector -. It can be a machine, a natural system, it can be a building, a city or perhaps, someday, the world. “
Just like the Tuscan genius of the 16th century, Leonardo designs flying machines. But even before screwing in a single bolt, he can know if that model of airplane or helicopter will be able to lift: “To Leonardo, the use of the digital twin is a way to design a machine and simulate its behavior even before the machine. itself exists – underlines Ongaro -. It means putting together all those models of behavior, structure, engines, aerodynamics and making them interact so that I can put a pilot in a simulator and let the pilot tell me if the behavior of that aircraft is fine or not. “
Once the real model is built, the digital twin begins a new life: “We can record all the data we get in the life of the real model, in the virtual model, which then begins to accumulate the same experiences and problems as the real twin – he continues. Ongaro – in this way it allows to predict what will be the effects of too hard landings or storms with wing strikes at the limits of the construction. We call it “predictive maintenance” “.
The “life management of a product” is one of the pillars of industry 4.0, which some call the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The same procedure can be applied to predict the life cycle of roads, bridges, buildings or mountains. Ground sensors and satellite measurements provide the data to dial the digital twin, at different scales, of anything. A field that needs water and fertilizer can autonomously activate irrigation only where it is needed. The measurement of precipitation is an economic index on which to anchor the prices of raw materials. The zoom can stretch from the danger of a landslide thanks to the radar of the probes in orbit, to the collapse of a building, up to our body: from the x-ray of a femur to the DNA.
The more you go into detail, the more the necessary computing power grows. The Da Vinci 1 is among the most powerful supercomputers in aerospace. There are 200 servers in 14 cabinets. The computation capacity is five Petaflops: like having twenty thousand “normal” computers working together at the same time on the same problem.
If we imagine being able to keep time going and understand how an airplane or our body ages, we are already doing something similar with the weather and, on a larger and more complex scale, with climate change: “Climate change is already happening now. – concludes Ongaro – this leads to a fairly sudden change in the conditions on which all our infrastructures were designed “.
Scientists use big data to model “Planet B”, an intelligent copy of the world, with which they can show politicians who govern us the effects of emissions, deforestation, land and resource exploitation. In summary: they push the “fast forward” button to show us how the Earth is aging. They show us the direction in which we are going, and the right one to take.