Chiara Franzoni, a PhD student in the 40th cycle at the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Brescia, supervised by Professors Stefano Rinaldi and Flammini, received the Best Paper Award in the "Digital Twins for Energy-Efficient Data Centers" section at the 34th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing.
The award was given to her scientific contribution, "Sensor-Driven Digital Twin Architectures for Energy-Efficient Data Centers: The Use Case of EV Charging Infrastructure," a paper that offers a comprehensive analysis of the main digital twin architectures for data center energy optimization. The article specifically examines the role of multi-source sensing, cloud-fog-edge data acquisition pipelines, and synchronization mechanisms between the physical system and the digital model, highlighting how these technologies can support real-time monitoring, forecasting, and energy-efficient control. Within this framework, the article presents a case study on an electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Particularly significant is the fact that the article shows how the same principles employed in digital twins for data centers can be extended to broader cyber-physical infrastructures, such as those for electric mobility and smart campuses.
The award was presented during the official awards ceremony held at the 34th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing, held in Cluj-Napoca on March 26, 2026, and recognizes the best paper in the field of using digital twins for data center energy optimization. The certificate was presented by Professor Virginia Niculescu, General Co-Chair of the conference and Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.