Iliad Digital Twins of the Ocean Interoperability Architecture

The Iliad Digital Twins of the Ocean project [1] is a large (55 partners) European Green Deal Project which aims at the development of an architecture and set of components, tools and services for the creation of digital twins of the ocean.  The approach aims to support the emerging European Digital Twins of the Ocean (EU DTO) initative including interoperability with associated projects like EDITO Infra and EDITO Model lab and the overall Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative and also taking advantage of the evolving European Common Data Spaces including the Green Deal Data Space, the Copernicus Data Space and the EOSC cross domain Data Space.  The approach of Iliad digital twin interoperability architecture based on four steps of a digital twin pipeline.

The four digital twin pipeline steps are:  Digital Twin Data Acquisition/Collection,  Digital Twin Data Representation, Digital Twin Hybrid and Cognitive/AI Analytics Models  and Digital Twin Visualisation and Control.  The Iliad project has idenified these four steps as main architectural pipeline areas from an interoperability perspective, as described in the following. The architecture is system of systems based and the figure also shows the existence of potential multiple digital twins interactions.

The first Digital Twin step focuses on Data acquisition and collection from various sources including collection of realtime see\nsor data, for input to the Digital Twin. This is supported by various Data Spaces and also through a direct Stream Handler. This includes both streaming data and data extraction from relevant external data sources and sensors.  It includes support for handling all relevant data types and also relevant data protection handling for this step. In the Digital Twin sensor context this includes the full Observation Pyramid from remote sensing through airborne sensors to surface and subsea sensors and in-situ and IoT sensors.

The second Digital Twin step focuses on Digital Twin Data Representation. The data availability for the digital twins is supported by various Digital Twin Data Lakes – connected to Data Spaces and also potentially directly to streaming observations from the previous step.

The third Digital Twin step focuses on Digital Twin Hybrid and Cognitive/AI Analytics Models.  The processing execution for the models is supported by various Digital Twin Engines.   

The fourth Digital Twin step focuses on Digital Twin Visualisation and Control.  This is being supported by various types of 2D/3D/4D visualisations, and immersive visualisations and further evolutions towards the GeoVerse perspective on MetaVerse.

The Iliad project is providing a framework with tools and services for these four digital twin pipeline steps aiming at technical and semantic interoperability with, and portability to, the EU DTO ecosystem of digital twins of the ocean.

[1] Iliad – Digital Twins of the Ocean project,  https://ocean-twin.eu/