Digital Twin of the North Sea and modular approach for reuse in other applications

Effective use of data driven intelligence for planning and decision making requires solutions that enable stakeholders to better understand the type of information that the data systems provide. In many cases stakeholders have limited expertise on a specific technical subject, but still need to understand and interpret the data driven intelligence to be able to act on limitations, consequences and alternatives.

Three-dimensional data and environment visualization in a virtual web environment can be such an innovation that helps to interpret data by emerging the user in a virtual world where the data is visualized realistically. And by being web-based, accessible via a normal web browser, a large audience can be targeted. An example of such an environment is a planned offshore wind farm, where the user is able to move and look around freely to examine energy yields, effects on fisheries, shipping industries and ecology.

At MARIS we have developed, with Deltares and for Rijkswaterstaat, a 3D digital twin of a wind farm in the North Sea using the game-engine Unity for the web. This 3D digital twin assists marine spatial planning in the surrounding area and allows the user to freely move around in the Prinses Amalia wind farm that is made to scale. It includes real time information on the water, waves and air temperature, the wind speed and direction and the energy yields of the wind turbines, and the application on screen responds “live” to this in visualised wave height, direction, turbine speed, graphs, etc. The wind farm contains multiple 3D assets for the turbines, local fish, vessels and more that the user can highlight for more information. The application runs smoothly in the browser on regular computers making it accessible to as many people as possible. In the developments of this 3D environment, a modular approach is applied, such that parts of the application, like the combination of mean sea level and waves, can be reused in other applications.

Digital twins have been a hot topic over the last years and will be for next years, with a focus mostly on the models and data behind them. The visualisation and user interfacing is still largely understated. With our developments we want to show what kind of 3D visualizations can be achieved using the blueprint environment in Unity. Because of the modular approach, the visualizations can be extended to include other available types of data and models and serve other types of use cases and applications, such as for marine protected areas - our next pilot in development under the Horizon Europe EFFECTIVE project.