Digital Twin Consortium publishes interoperable Digital Twins for multimodal transport networks

Digital Twin Consortium has released its new white paper, Interoperable Digital Twins for Multimodal Transport Networks: Optimizing Passenger and Freight Journeys, which presents a vendor-neutral blueprint for addressing fragmentation across air, rail, road, and maritime transportation systems.

“To realize the full value of digital twins in transportation, the industry must move beyond isolated implementations toward coordinated, system-level execution,” said Dan Isaacs, GM and CTO of the Digital Twin Consortium. “This white paper outlines how common information models, event‑driven architectures, and system‑of‑systems thinking can enable trusted collaboration, real‑time decision‑making, and measurable improvements across multimodal networks.”

Multimodal transportation networks today are constrained by siloed data systems, disconnected governance models, and limited real-time coordination across public and private stakeholders. These challenges lead to increased costs, delayed freight and disconnected passenger journeys. The white paper outlines how interoperable digital twins, combined with AI agents, blockchain, geographic information systems (GIS), and mobile platforms, can enable coordinated, end-to-end optimization across transportation ecosystems.

“Multimodal transportation systems don’t fail because of a lack of innovation—they fail because those innovations can’t work together at scale,” said Doug Migliori, Co-chair of the Digital Twin Consortium Mobility and Transportation Working Group, and Principal Consultant, Rockport Software.

“This white paper provides a practical blueprint for interoperability, showing how digital twins, AI, and shared governance can align stakeholders, improve day‑to‑day operations, and optimize passenger and freight journeys end to end.”

The paper introduces architectural and governance frameworks—including system-of-systems methodology, common information models, and event-driven, distributed architectures—to help organizations move beyond isolated solutions toward scalable interoperability. A phased implementation roadmap guides stakeholders from pilot projects to fully interoperable systems, with modeling and simulation embedded to reduce risk and accelerate time-to-value.

To further support practitioners, the white paper demonstrates how digital transformation initiatives can be systematically analyzed and documented using a system-of-systems (SoS) metamodel generated through an engineered large language model (LLM) prompt, which is included in the white paper for readers to access and apply directly.