Towards Interconnected Digital Twins for Inland Waters

<p dir="ltr">Inland water resource management faces urgent challenges driven by climate change, evolving regulations, and system interdependencies across the water cycle. Addressing these requires collaboration among cross-sectoral stakeholders empowered by data-driven, risk-based strategies, advanced monitoring, and AI-powered Digital Twins—virtual replicas used to simulate and analyze water system dynamics under various conditions. Nevertheless, most Digital Twins currently operate in isolation, lacking a unified framework for interoperability. The Horizon Europe project IDEATION tackles this by co-developing a roadmap with stakeholders for a European Digital Twin of Inland Waters and ensuring compatibility with the European Digital Twin of the Ocean. This paper introduces the methodological framework proposed in IDEATION to support such interconnected Digital Twins. The first performed steps are presented together with preliminary results.</p><p dir="ltr">This paper was presented at the 21st Computing and Control in the Water Industry Conference (CCWI 2025) at the University of Sheffield (1st - 3rd September 2025).</p>