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Why we investigated Digital Twins across Europe
Digital Twins are increasingly relevant as digital representations of physical objects, systems, and processes to enable new ways of integrating and utilising data, particularly in mobility, infrastructure and urban development. They can improve process efficiency, reduce resource consumption, and promote cross-sectoral collaboration, data-based planning, simulation, and decision making. However, many current applications remain limited to individual sectors, organisations, or countries, although e.g. transport networks, energy systems, environmental processes, and data flows frequently extend across these boundaries.
Exploring Transnational Digital Twins
The OpenTwin project, therefore, examined the potential and current development of “Transnational Digital Twins” as an emerging concept across Europe. These systems connect digital representations, data, and organisations across national, administrative, and sectoral boundaries. The research analysed their status quo, added value, implementation challenges and enabling factors in regard to e.g. technical and organisational structures and data requirements with a special focus on open data.
The study combines a systematic literature review, an empirical analysis of 77 European projects and initiatives, and interviews with experts from 10 European countries. It identified applications in mobility and transport, environmental and climate research, cities, energy systems, crisis prevention, and border regions as important testing fields. Mobility showed to be currently one of the most mature application domains, while cities and border regions increasingly provide reusable blueprints and infrastructural foundations that can support the development of future Digital Twins across borders.
Further, research shows that the main barriers are not primarily technological but organisational, institutional and regulatory. Cross-border Digital Twins require shared objectives, coordinated governance, interoperable data models, common standards, secure data exchange, and stable regulatory and funding conditions. Open data can reduce access barriers and support interoperability, but operational applications usually depend on a combination of open, proprietary and sensitive data. Federated architectures and data spaces were found to provide promising foundations for exchanging this data securely while allowing it to remain under the control of its original owners.
The research report is intended for public authorities, infrastructure operators, researchers, funding bodies and project teams working on (cross-border) Digital Twin applications.
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The full research report is available for download below.
The OpenTwin project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Transport within the mFUND funding programme.
