Apr 10, 2025

Key takeaways from the workshop: Advancing Inland Waterways with Digital Twins

Thursday, April 17th, 2025

On 10 April 2025, ALICE hosted a well-attended and highly interactive workshop “Advancing Inland Waterways with Digital Twins – Exploring CRISTAL project innovations and MultiRELOAD project demonstrator.” The event brought together over 50 participants from across Europe, reflecting growing interest in the role of Digital Twins in enhancing inland waterway transport (IWT).

Digital Twins are increasingly seen as a critical enabler for more resilient, efficient, and sustainable inland navigation. During the two-hour online workshop, speakers from research organisations, ports, logistics technology providers, and EU-funded projects CRISTAL and MultiRELOAD demonstrated practical applications of these technologies, while panel discussions and live Q&A sessions helped to assess the maturity and potential of Digital Twins for IWT.

CRISTAL project: operational decision support with Digital Twins

Orestis Tsolakis (CERTH) and Edwin van Hassel (University of Antwerp) presented the CRISTAL project’s Synchromodal Corridor Management System (SCMS) and its integration with Digital Twins. These tools are designed to improve operational decision-making and increase resilience of inland waterway networks through:

Real-time and predictive monitoring of water levels, infrastructure status, and navigability.
Sensor technologies (e.g. smart buoys, acoustic emission monitoring) for early detection of infrastructure degradation and waterway disruptions.
Forecasting models to support route planning, multimodal shift decisions, and environmental impact assessments.

The value proposition of the SCMS was detailed using a business model canvas approach, highlighting the system’s ability to reduce uncertainty for logistics operators and infrastructure managers alike.

MultiRELOAD project: environmental monitoring in ports

José Antonio Clemente Pérez (Prodevelop) presented a Digital Twin demonstrator applied in the Port of Duisburg. The platform enables real-time monitoring of environmental conditions, emission levels, and infrastructure performance, with features such as

Modular design supporting big data analytics and historical data integration.
Live dashboards for air quality, weather data, vessel emissions, and infrastructure conditions.
Interoperability with satellite data sources to complement environmental monitoring.

The demonstrator will be further developed into a commercial solution and can be tailored to support port authorities, terminal operators, and urban logistics stakeholders.

Bridging innovation and practical use

Moderated by Tammo Märtens (Fraunhofer IML) and Tomasz Dowgielewicz(ALICE), the panel included representatives from Duisport, Hafen Wien, Fundación Valenciaport, CERTH, Prodevelop, and ITA. Key messages included:

The main challenges for Digital Twin adoption in IWT are data quality, interoperability, and real-time analytics capabilities.
Standardisation across platforms and modes remains critical to ensure wider adoption and compatibility.
Participants highlighted that investment in digital infrastructure and open data sharing are essential to unlock the full value of Digital Twins.
Cross-sector collaboration, between infrastructure managers, logistics operators, researchers, and policymakers, was seen as a prerequisite for success.

The interactive Slido session echoed these insights, with participants identifying a lack of digital infrastructure and data sharing as the biggest barriers, and resilience, multimodal synchronisation, and predictive maintenance as the key benefits of Digital Twins in IWT.

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