COAST-OPS TWIN – Climate-Resilient Coastal Operations Digital Twin

COAST-OPS TWIN – Climate-Resilient Coastal Operations Digital Twin for Maritime Waste Collection and Shoreline Cleaning

Muğla Metropolitan Municipality is developing COAST-OPS TWIN, a project concept for the DUT Call 2026 – Circular Urban Economies (CUE), Topic 2: Innovative Maintenance of Urban Green and Blue Spaces, under the Innovation-Oriented Approach.

The project aims to develop and demonstrate a climate-resilient digital operational twin for coastal municipal services, bringing together maritime waste collection and shoreline cleaning. By combining operational, environmental and climate-related data, the project will explore how digital tools and data-driven decision support can improve service efficiency, climate resilience and the ecological management of urban and peri-urban blue spaces.

Muğla Metropolitan Municipality will contribute as a pilot city and real-life demonstration environment, bringing its municipal operational experience, relevant data, facilities, field personnel and local stakeholder networks to the project. The concept also includes Urban Living Lab activities to support the co-development and testing of solutions with relevant local actors.

The project is designed with a transnational and transferable perspective, allowing the proposed approach to be tested in different coastal urban contexts and supporting its potential replication in other cities.

To bring this project concept to life, Muğla Metropolitan Municipality is looking for suitable partners interested in jointly developing and implementing the project. We are particularly interested in cooperation with:

• universities and research organisations with expertise in digital twins, operations research, coastal ecology and Living Labs;

• coastal municipalities and other urban public authorities interested in piloting or replicating the approach;

• research partners working on coastal ecology and marine litter; and

• technology partners with expertise in digital twins, GIS, data architecture, forecasting, optimisation and decision-support systems.

We also welcome interest from organisations with relevant experience that could contribute to the coordination and further development of the project concept.

Through COAST-OPS TWIN, we aim to bring together municipalities, research organisations and technology partners to jointly develop a practical and transferable approach for more data-driven, climate-resilient and ecologically sensitive management of coastal and blue spaces.