First Iliad-inspired IEEE standards project for DTEs gets green light to go ahead

The US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Association’s Oceanic Engineering Society / Standards Committee (OES/SC) has given its approval to begin work on a standards project titled “Recommended Practice for the Development of Digital Twins of the Earth” (P3501), the first such project inspired by the EU-funded Iliad project for Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTOs).

“This recommended practice covers the development processes for Digital Twins of the Earth (DTEs) and their subsystems along with reconfiguration pathways that realign existing systems or elements thereof to fit these recommended digital twin practices,” the dedicated IEEE study group said in the proposal. “The purpose of this recommended practice is to aid in the creation of a digital twin.” 

There is a need to establish consensus alignment on development practices that help guide and validate the various layers of interoperability, including architecture, syntactics, schematics, semantics, and legal or ethical interoperability concerns, in order to ensure holistic value for the entire cross-domain ecosystem of digital twins, they argued.

“Convening a multi-party group of (digital) engineers to propose engineering standards that can let twins plug in to one another, and thus have a life beyond a single project, is needed,” the proposal’s authors added, comparing the DTE engineering standards being developed to those allowing smartphones and supercomputers to interact and work together despite dependence on proprietary technology ostensibly hindering that.

“Such good engineering practices are needed to support the development of interoperable digital twins - both on a technological level, but also to facilitate an exchange between the projects and engineers themselves, by fostering common vocabulary and understanding of basic DT components”, they said.

During the development of this recommended practice, a focus is put on DTOs, as the ocean is a specific subsystem of the Earth, and while many ocean models within a DTO are ocean-specific, other attributes, data inputs and models are expected overlap with other Earth systems. The chosen approach therefore supports outlining general DTE aspects as well as those of specific earth subsystems, such as oceans, with the aim of allowing other specific Earth-subsystem Digital Twin standards to be developed as well. ILIAD was mentioned as one of the important DTE initiatives relevant to the standards project.

The recommended practice being developed contains engineering practices applicable to the development of interoperable digital twins, including the underlying reference architectures and components of DTEs, as well as the interfaces between different digital subsystems, and related data and service models necessary to describe a digital twin, its functions, outputs and the interfaces (both inputs and outputs) with other DTEs.

A digital twin is defined as a set of virtual information constructs that mimics the structure, context, and behaviour of a natural, engineered, or social system (or system-of-systems), that is dynamically updated with data from its physical twin, has a predictive capability, and informs decisions that realize value. Digital Twins of the Earth focus on the planet Earth and its subsystems, including, atmosphere, cryosphere, oceans, solid Earth, lifeforms, and human-engineered systems and their interactions.

“The bidirectional interaction between the virtual and the physical is central to a digital twin,” the proposal’s authors stressed.

The project is scheduled to run until the end of 2026.