The ILIAD consortium, which includes 56 international partners, will develop virtual representations of the sea that will integrate and extend existing EU earth observing, modelling digital infrastructures and computing facilities to provide highly accurate predictions of future developments.

January 2022 – the European Union (EU) has granted the ILIAD Consortium €17 million to develop and launch a Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) that will provide highly accurate predictions of future developments at global seas.

The ILIAD Project, which is comprised of 56 partners from 18 different countries in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, has been awarded the funding as part of the EU the €1 billion European Green Deal.

ILIAD will develop virtual models designed to accurately reflect changes and processes accruing at the ocean. ILIAD will commercialise an interoperable, data-intensive, and cost-effective model, capitalising the explosion of new data provided by many different earth sources, modern computing infrastructure including Internet of Things, social networking, Big Data, cloud computing and more.

The ILIAD consortium, which has received funding through the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, will combine high-resolution modelling with real-time sensing of ocean parameters, advanced algorithms for forecasting of spatio-temporal events and pattern recognition. The virtual representations will consist of several real-time to near-real-time digital replicas of the ocean.

ILIAD will also create a marketplace to distribute apps, plug-ins, interfaces, raw data, citizen science data, synthesised information and value-added services in combination with the ILIAD DTO.

The project partners include industrial companies, end users, academic institutions, research and technology developers and private firms.

About ILIAD

ILIAD is an EU-funded project which aims to develop and launch virtual models of the ocean that will provide highly accurate predictions of future developments at global seas.

ILIAD develops representations designed to accurately reflect changes and processes accruing at the ocean. ILIAD will commercialise an interoperable, data-intensive, and cost-effective model, capitalising the explosion of new data provided by many different earth sources, modern computing infrastructure including Internet of Things, social networking, Big Data, cloud computing and more.

For more information https://ocean-twin.eu/

Coordinator

Kostantinos Thivaios, INTRASOFT International

The Coastal and Marine Research Laboratory of FORTH is a central partner of the project and will deal with the development and application of operational ocean forecasting models, the analysis of observations and the development of Artificial Intelligence methods, for forecasting of extreme events and pattern recognition in climatic and oceanographic variables. As part of the project, the Coastal Crete oceanographic service operated by the laboratory (funded by Mercator Ocean International) will be developed into a Digital Twin for the coastal area around Crete, as one of the individual Digital Twins that will be developed for the European Seas. It will integrate monitoring of oceanographic variables by novel in-situ sensors that will be installed in the coastal area of Crete. Coastal Crete will be the first Greek DTO, providing users with information services for safe use of maritime space and high-resolution forecasts, early warning systems, support for response to environmental hazards as well as (near) real-time field data.