Integrating and comparing structural modeling methods within a digital workbench

The creation of reliable structural geological models is often a crucial component of geoscientific workflows. Challenges emerge not only from the availability of data and model construction but also regarding the knowledge and accessibility of software, coding abilities (particularly for open-source tools), and geological expertise. These obstacles hinder the exploration, evaluation, and comparison of diverse modeling methods, often leading to highly customized workflows for specific scenarios that are labor-intensive to create and hard to reuse in other settings.

To mitigate these issues, we present a workbench for digital geosystems that employs a component-and-connector software architecture alongside both textual and graphical domain-specific languages (DSLs) to establish a modular framework. Within this framework, we define fixed interface formats for each workflow step, allowing components responsible for specific tasks to be interchangeable. Structural modeling serves as the initial step in these workflows, which also encompass 3D mesh generation, simulation, and visualization, thereby representing a typical geoscientific workflow.

Within this design, multiple components can be integrated for each workflow step, facilitating straightforward method comparison. Additionally, the DSLs enhance usability for users who may not have extensive coding experience.

We will showcase the software architecture and DSL system through a series of simple models with an emphasis on structural geological modeling and comparisons among multiple implicit modeling methods. A cloud-based version of the graphical DSL will be provided to test the workbench with a curated set of input datasets.