Workshop · BNAIC / BeNeLearn 2026

Artificial Intelligence for Digital Twins: Challenges and Best Practices

This is the first edition of the AI4DT workshop, a session bringing together researchers and practitioners to share advances in AI-driven digital twins — and to critically examine the challenges, lessons learned, and best practices from real-world deployments.

📅 October 21, 2026 📍 Maastricht University, The Netherlands ⏱️ 3 hours

About the workshop

A digital twin is a software/hardware system that tightly couples physical assets with real-time data, simulation, and AI-driven analytics, and is rapidly emerging as a foundational technology across industry, infrastructure, and science. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to share recent advances in integrating AI into digital twin architectures, while critically examining the challenges, lessons learned, and best practices arising from real-world deployments.

🎯 Goals

Present and discuss original research on AI-enabled digital twins, identify open challenges and emerging best practices in the field, and foster community building among Benelux and international researchers.

👥 Intended audience

Researchers, industry practitioners, students, and policymakers working at the intersection of AI and cyber-physical / digital twin systems.

Topics of interest

Since this workshop has a particular focus on AI for Digital Twins, we welcome submissions on any of the AI topics covered by the main BNAIC 2026 conference, provided the work is relevant to, or has potential implications for, digital twins, cyber-physical systems, or related intelligent systems. Contributors are expected to address topics including, but not limited to:

Modeling & simulation

AI-driven modeling and simulation within digital twin architectures.

Monitoring & maintenance

Machine learning methods for real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance.

Explainable & trustworthy AI

Explainability and trustworthiness for digital twin applications.

Multi-agent & federated DTs

Multi-agent and federated approaches for distributed digital twins.

Domain applications

Manufacturing, smart cities, healthcare, energy, and other application domains.

Evaluation & benchmarks

Evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and emerging best practices.

Important dates

July 15, 2026
Submissions open
August 31, 2026
Paper submission deadline
September 30, 2026
Notification of acceptance
October 9, 2026
Camera-ready submission
October 21, 2026
Workshop

Submission details

Reviews will be single-blind. All submissions should include the authors' names and their affiliations. All contributions should be written in English, using the Springer CCIS/LNCS format and submitted electronically through OpenReviews. Submission implies the willingness of at least one author to register for BNAIC/BeNeLearn 2026 and present in person at the conference.
Please submit a single self-contained PDF file. For full and short submissions, please include links to any code/dataset you use. If you need to submit additional files or additional information that might be important for reviewers to make a decision, you should prepare a repository (e.g., Github, Gitlab) with these files and specify in "Additional files" the link to the repository. Please include any relevant information needed to use them.
Authors of selected FULL papers from the AI4DT workshop will be invited to submit extended versions to Digital Twins and Applications (IET/Wiley), subject to the journal's standard peer review process.
We will accept the following submission types:

Full Submissions (max. 12 pages, not considering refs):

  • Original full papers: This must be unpublished work
  • Transfers from related conferences: Papers submitted to other venues that have not been accepted. Please attach the PDF of your previous submission, the reviews you received, and a list of changes made to the current submission

Research Highlights (1-2 pages, not considering refs):

  • This format is intended for PhD students, early-career postdoctoral researchers, and industry practitioners to present work that may not yet qualify for a full paper category but that represents an innovative idea or ongoing work.

Authors are encouraged to review the Preprint Policy of the Digital Twins and Applications Journal prior to submission. We also encourage authors to make presentation handouts available to the community, either via their personal webpages or through the workshop webpage, subject to prior agreement with the organizers.

Generative AI Usage Disclosure

Authors. Authors must disclose any use of generative AI tools in the preparation of their submission, including but not limited to generating, drafting, editing, or refining text, figures, code, or results. Disclosure should specify which tools were used and for what purpose. Authors remain fully responsible for the entire content of their submission, including any portion produced with the assistance of such tools, and for ensuring its accuracy, originality, and compliance with the conference's ethical and plagiarism standards.
Reviewers. The use of generative AI tools to generate or review submissions is not encouraged. Reviewers who choose to use such tools do so at their own responsibility and must ensure that any generated output is accurate and consistent with the content of the reviewed paper. Reviewers must not upload, paste, or otherwise submit any part of a manuscript or its confidential content to external AI tools, as this may compromise the confidentiality of the peer-review process.

Preliminary agenda

5 min
Opening and welcome by organizers
40 min
Keynote + Q&A
60 min
Paper session 1 — 4 papers, ≈15 min each
10 min
Short break
60 min
Paper session 2 — 4 papers, ≈15 min each
5 min
Closure

Keynote speaker

Joost Mertens
Dr. ing. Joost Mertens
University of Antwerp – Flanders Make, Belgium

Title: Engineering Digital Twins in the Age of AI
Abstract: Digital Twins, that is, digital representations of systems that operate alongside them, have become common for optimizing systems. Examples are numerous: they may optimize motion profiles of cyber-physical systems, improve scheduling of a logistics system, or smartly control a building's HVAC system. At the core of Digital Twins are the simulation models of the real system. They are the key to the what-if analysis necessary for making the offered smart services possible.
In recent years, techniques from the Artificial Intelligence field have found their way into the development and operation of Digital Twins. Black-box or surrogate models are replacing traditional white-box ones, classifiers and predictors support monitoring and anomaly detection, and AI-assisted workflows help with implementation and maintenance. This keynote explores these developments from the viewpoint of the modelling and simulation community, identifying both their strengths and weaknesses.

Dr. ing. Joost Mertens is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, Faculty of Applied Engineering in Electronics and ICT. His research interests comprise methods and techniques to model, deploy and operate Digital Twins, in particular their continuous evolution during operation. He specializes in Digital Twins of Cyber-Physical Systems, Systems-of-Systems and built environments.

Workshop organizers

The AI4DT 2026 workshop is organized by:

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Université Libre de Bruxelles · WEL Research Institute, Belgium
FARI – AI for the Common Good Institute · Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Reviewers' committee:

Questions about the workshop?

Reach out to the organizing team — we'd love to hear from you.

ai4dt.workshop 'at' gmail.com