The Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES) is a platform for collaboration between the University of Cambridge and Singaporean research institutes. The largest project at CARES is the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Reduction in Chemical Technology (C4T), which develops technologies and techniques to reduce the carbon footprint of chemical industries. One breakthrough in this area is an approach developed by CARES to create an architecture for a universal digital twin – something that can describe the state and behaviour of any interconnected system.

The World Avatar (TWA) project aims to create a digital avatar of the real world. TWA represents the digital world using a dynamic knowledge graph containing concepts and data describing the world. TWA simulates the world’s behaviour with an ecosystem of autonomous computational agents that update the concepts and data so that the digital world remains current in time. In this manner, it is possible to create digital twins that can describe the behaviour of any complex system and can make data-driven decisions about how to optimise the systems.