A Digital Twin for Training Marine Pollution Control

Abstract

This paper presents a Digital Twin to prepare an international response to marine pollution events. This research is conducted by a multidisciplinary team of information systems and marine pollution experts to create a digital environment suitable to represent near-real-time pollution events, assisting the command structure and combat teams in improving performance and knowledge of standard protocols. The reported results were obtained in the first year of the project and included (1) the Digital Twin architecture, (2) the simulation of the natural conditions, and (3) the prototype of the performance evaluation dashboard. Our findings suggest that current simulation systems help inform decisions but are insufficient to prepare complex scenarios requiring coordination between multiple agents operating in extreme conditions. Digital Twins can help in preparing procedures and evaluating performance in digital representations. This study contributes to a recent Digital Twin literature trend that aims to create digital replicas of comprehensive sociotechnical scenarios.