Challenges Towards an Integrated Digital Twin Platform for Maritime Systems: Tackling Shifts in Data Ownership

Abstract

Organizing product data from various sources and lifecycle stages into a standardized digital representation is a challenge faced by multiple actors in the maritime industry. Maintaining product data models, especially during handover and commissioning, can be difficult due to data ownership shifts and the lack of formal data governance. In maritime systems, particularly the shipping industry, these concerns are especially pronounced as ship commissioning is accompanied by traditional customs marking the transfer of ownership and management of the ship asset. This discontinuity decouples the digital ship models between the design and operation value chains. The lack of data traceability typically results in the manual integration of data models with various interpretations, databases, and dictionaries. Failure to effectively manage these data models can lead to higher costs for information reconciliation and error correction in the future.

This paper evaluates the challenges of data traceability across a maritime system’s lifecycle, mainly using ship lifecycle phases as an example. It compiles the current understanding of how physical objects are represented in virtual environments, covering concepts such as digital prototypes, instances, aggregate, twins, and the digital thread, to explore the evolution of maritime systems’ product data from upstream to downstream lifecycle phases. The paper concludes with a selection of challenges that need to be tackled and potential frameworks that may be used as solutions.