# Digital Twins' Application for Geotechnical Engineering:
## 5 Conclusions  
In this era of universal datafication, digital twin technology has unveiled a transformative paradigm, progressively blurring the boundaries between the physical world and its data-driven virtual counterpart. As technological advancements continue to mature digital twins' capabilities, the realization of digitalization and intelligentization in geotechnical engineering appears inevitable.  
Historically, the genesis of digital twins can be traced to innovations in modeling and simulation technologies, while their exponential growth has been propelled by breakthroughs in sensing technologies. With the collective advancement and deep integration of next-generation information technologies, digital twins are poised to enter an expansive phase of development. The transition towards digitalization and informatization has become an inescapable imperative across industries.  
As an integral component of new infrastructure development, geotechnical engineering has found that digital twin technology is to be an indispensable pathway towards intelligentization and digital transformation. However, the core challenges currently faced by geotechnical engineering digital twins include the following: the strong heterogeneity and invisibility of underground environments make high-quality data acquisition, installation, and validation difficult; the highly complex, multi-physics, and nonlinear behavior of geotechnical materials poses challenges in constructing, computing, and validating high-precision physical models; there is a contradiction between the information silos of multi-source heterogeneous systems and the seamless integration required by real-world demands; methods for data-model fusion and uncertainty quantification/management remain immature; the inherent conflict between real-time requirements and the massive computational power needed for high-fidelity models cannot be ignored; and cost-benefit models and clear definitions of engineering application scenarios are still under exploration and development. Despite these significant challenges, addressing them is essential for advancing geotechnical engineering toward intelligence and precision. With progress in sensor technology, edge computing, AI, cloud computing, and industry standards, these bottlenecks are expected to be gradually overcome.  
This paper has systematically reviewed the current state of digital twin applications in geotechnical engineering in China, elucidated existing challenges, and outlined future research directions. It is hoped that this work will serve as a catalyst for further advancements in geotechnical digital twin technologies, stimulating more in-depth research and innovation in this field.  
Conceptualization, W.T.; investigation, Y.L.; writing--original draft preparation, W.T.; writing--review and editing, W.T. and S.W.; visualization, S.W. and Y.L.; project administration, W.T. and Q.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China, No. 2023 YFC2907302 and National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 52274072.  
**Data Availability Statement:** No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.