In this article, a digital twin is a numerical model of a dam–foundation system with a physical basis. A dam–foundation system exhibits a complex behavior and, therefore, significant simplifications are necessary for a numerical model to be feasible, which reduces a model’s accuracy.
Differences in the material characteristics of particular regions of the dam and the foundation are usually not considered. An important reason for that is the high computational cost of calibrating a model when many parameters must be optimized in such a way that calibration becomes unfeasible.
A new, simple, accurate, and low time-consuming algorithm, the centroid method, is presented that allows the calibration of a dam–foundation system. The extreme efficiency of this algorithm opens the feasibility of calibrating a sectorized numerical model of an arch dam, so that a digital twin is obtained that takes into account the different characteristics of different regions or sectors of the dam and the foundation, more closely approaching the complex behavior of the dam–foundation system.
