The presentation provides an overview of the current status and strategic direction for implementing digital twins for bridges from the perspective of the Federal Highway and Transport Research Institute (BASt). It also incorporates the objectives and perspectives of the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMV). The state of research and practice is illustrated through selected example projects. Finally, key implementation challenges are discussed, and potential solutions are outlined.

From 2025, the KRITIS Act will regulate the resilience and physical security of critical infrastructures. In conjunction with the EU Directive on measures for a common level of cybersecurity across the European Union (NIS 2 Directive) and supplemented by industry-specific security standards (e.g. from the German Technical and Scientific Association for Gas and Water), the requirements for the monitoring of critical facilities are now increasing for operators. Digital twins offer excellent features for integrating them into critical infrastructure assessment procedures. As a mirror image of real hardware components (e.g. building information from BIM, characteristic data of machines) and environmental events (water levels, weather phenomena, etc.), the sensor data of the digital twins transfer their measured values and observations into manual, partially or fully automated inspection processes. The presentation describes this integration of information technology and operational technology (IT/OT convergence) to be implemented with the help of digital twins and refers to the corresponding catalogues of measures of the BSI (Federal Office for Information Security) for KRITIS assessments.

Die Megatrends in der Geoinformationstechnologie wie Cloud, open source und mobile devices führen dazu, dass die Anbieter dieser Technologien ihre Geschäftsmodelle und Produkte fortentwickeln, bis hin zu strategischen Partnerschaften und Firmenübernahmen. Der Betrieb von GIS-Plattformen in der Cloud ermöglicht neue Formen der Partnerschaft mit Partnern und Kunden mit vielen Vorteilen für alle. Die Produktion und Bereitstellung der Geobasisdaten in der Cloud bietet neue Wertschöpfungsketten und unterstützt die Bestrebungen der öffentlichen Verwaltungen zur Haushaltskonsolidierung. Digitale Souveränität wird dabei zu einem zunehmend zentralen Gestaltungsfaktor – sowohl politisch als auch operativ. Daraus ergeben sich spezifische Anforderungen und Treiber, die über allgemeine IT-Souveränität hinausgehen, um die Kontrolle über Geodaten und Anwendungen zu behalten, die Abhängigkeit von proprietären GIS-Plattformen zu reduzieren, die langfristige Verfügbarkeit von IT-Fachverfahren zu sichern sowie souveräne Cloud- und Hostingstrategien zu entwickeln. Unter dem Dach des Lenkungsausschuss Geobasis entwickeln die Landesvermessungs- und Geoinformationsverwaltungen der Bundesländer und des Bundes gegenwärtig Strategien zur Sicherstellung der digitalen Souveränität für die Geodaten in ihrem Verantwortungsbereich.

Digital sovereignty encompasses more than the use of open source software - it describes the ability of institutions and individuals to shape their digital processes independently, self-determinedly and securely. This ability is essential for administrations with central responsibility for the management and provision of geodata. This article looks at digital sovereignty from a technical perspective. The focus is on the question of how IT systems and their specifications can be designed in such a way that they remain maintainable, technologically flexible and interoperable in the long term. At the same time, they should be easy to use and resource-efficient so that they can be operated independently even under limited personnel and financial conditions. There are also challenges on the user side: Basic geodata should be findable without specialist knowledge, understandable and usable in a wide variety of IT environments and tools. The technical design of data provision therefore has a direct impact on the digital sovereignty of administration, business and society. Examples are used to show how current architectures such as the AdV's GeoInfoDok could be improved in order to strengthen digital sovereignty.