In this project, we will seamlessly combine two disciplines that have been historically received continuous government and industrial funding: physics-based modelling, which is generalisable and robust but may require tremendous computational cost, and machine learning, which is adaptive and fast to be evaluated but not easily generalisable and robust. The intersection of the two spawns scientific machine learning, which maximises the strengths and minimises the weaknesses of the two approaches. The data will be provided by high-fidelity simulations and experiments, from the UK state-of-the-art facilities and software. The efficiency of the machine learning training will be maximised for the algorithms to require minimal energy (thereby, producing minimal emissions by minimising electricity consumption). This project builds upon large UK and EU funded expertise in scientific machine learning and simulation, which will be generalised to fast, real-time decision making. The most significant bottleneck of most scientific machine learning is that they need time to be re-trained offline when new data becomes available. We will transform offline paradigms into real-time approaches for the models to re-adapt and provide accurate estimates on the fly. This project will culminate into the delivery of practical digital twins (defined as digital counterparts of real world physical systems or processes that can be used for simulation, prediction of behaviour to inputs, monitoring, maintenance, planning and optimisation) to solve currently intractable problems in wind energy, hydrogen, and road transportation. This project will transfer the technical achievements and real-time digital twin to policy-making.

The High End Computing Consortium for Wave Structure Interaction (HEC WSI) is a new and emerging communities consortium that represents the established community of researchers in wave structure interaction that are working together through the support of the CCP-WSI+ (Collaborative Computational Project on Wave Structure Interaction plus). This brings together a community of researchers in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structure mechanics (CSM) who are developing and applying fully coupled wave structure interaction numerical modelling tools suitable for the latest challenges in coastal and ocean engineering, and other wave structure interaction (WSI) free surface flow problems, such as sloshing in containers and liquid fuels, and would benefit from access to significant HPC resource. The consortium addresses underpinning research applicable to Net Zero and Decarbonisation solutions aligned with UK Government strategy and will enable new science and innovation unlocked by access to high-end computing capabilities for solving WSI problems in these areas. The consortium will make significant technical developments of software codes to enhance their suitability for high-end computing. These will include optimising key codes used within the WSI community to achieve better scalability of the multi-phase solvers, developing tools to allow interoperability between the solvers for fluids and solid mechanics, developing coupling strategies between wave, wind, rigid body and hydro elastics models for different applications in costal/ocean engineering and related areas, and also developing AI/ML surrogate modelling tools informed by high fidelity WSI simulations utilising the aforementioned developments. The consortium will maximise the involvement of the whole community working on coastal and ocean engineering and related areas. These will include providing the opportunity for researchers in the community to port and benchmark their own codes and to use the software codes supported by the consortium on the HPC resource. The HEC WSI will also provide opportunities for early career researchers to learn and become proficient in using HPC resources and will serve as a forum to communicate research and share HEC WSI expertise within the WSI community, helping to promote the highest quality engineering research and provide leadership in developing strategic agendas for the WSI community. The success of this consortium will be ensured by supporting the existing wide CCP-WSI+ network of over 200 researchers, spanning academia and industry in 5 continents working on WSI, ORE (offshore renewable energy) and other relevant applications and sectors. The community will be strengthened and consolidated through this project. The HEC WSI will expand the volume of users, provide support for the WSI and wider community and significantly enhance WSI codes for them to be used on HPCs and most advanced high-end computing systems by the end of this project.