Geospatial Use Cases Enabling Interoperability of Digital Twins

For many years geospatial users have been building 3d scenes and worlds for various use cases: replicating the physical world, modeling various scenarios using geo design techniques, generating analytical results using geospatial tools, predicting outcomes using Deep Learning and AI workflows, and lately, consuming massive 3d geospatial content in game engines. Lately, geospatial users have started sharing and modeling these use cases as Digital Twins – be it as an Environmental Digital Twin used for modeling air quality, noise, climate, or groundwater projects, a Planning Digital Twin used in the visualization of urban development scenarios, an Operations Digital Twin for managing building and facility operation, or simply as a Reality Capture Digital Twin used to model the as-built environment, particularly useful in the creation of a 3D City Model. In this brief paper, we’ll cover digital twin concepts, explore use cases and examples in geospatial that are priorities in creating a digital twin of the earth and how it can be achieved in an interoperable manner using both Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) and Commercial of the Shelf (COTS) solutions. We’ll do so by highlighting and dissecting various use cases including visualizing atmospheric or oceanic data, a geological underground model, or space-time cubes as voxel layers. We also show the power of digital twins by demonstrating the fusing of a 3D mesh layer and Building Information Model (BIM) with voxel layers to model and visualize an underground borehole with temporally variable construction models planned in an area. Geospatial users expect a digital twin to be multidimensional and interconnected throughout its lifecycle and ideally, to be powered by an open format/standard. Open standards foster interoperability and composability increasing the consistent delivery of 3D content. We will conclude the paper with a review of one such OGC 3D streaming standard, I3S, as a 3d streaming standard of choice for digital twins.