By connecting digital models and physical assets in real time, digital twins enable new levels of agility across industry for planning and optimization, as well as predictive maintenance. The recent vision of Industry 5.0 puts digital twin technology at the service of the green transition, emphasizing sustainable and human-centric goals for industry. But in fact, these goals also concern nature and how humans interact with nature. In this talk, we explore the potential of digital twins as a technology backbone for Nature 5.0, connecting digital models with natural systems in real-time - not only for environmental monitoring, but for long-term decision making and sustainability.  We discuss different aspects of engineering digital twins of ecosystems, including digital twin architectures, interoperability, model management, and self-adaptation, as well as challenges and opportunities in this interdisciplinary work. The talk will be illustrated by examples from our own work, such as the digital twin of the Oslofjord.

Author Bio

Einar Broch Johnsen is a Professor and head of the research group on Reliable Systems at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. His research interests include programming models, semantics and methodology; program specification and modeling; formal methods and associated theory; model-based analysis, testing, and formal logic. With digital twins, his research interests extend from model-based analysis to model-centric systems; his work on digital twins spans from self-adaptation and sensor-driven model management to programming abstractions and architectures. He is also interested in the socio-technological aspects of digital twins and digital twins of natural systems, including marine ecosystems and pandemic prevention. He is one of the main developers of ABS, a modeling language for asynchronous distributed systems, and SMOL, a formally defined programming language for digital twins.