Description 

The procurement run by RHEA on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA) is on the first round of use cases selection for the Destination Earth Core Service Platform (DESP). Organisations have been engaged to take part in developing use cases that will demonstrate the added value of the Destination Earth (DestinE) system in addressing EU policy needs working in sectors impacted by environmental or climate changes. This activity also aims to validate the DestinE Core Service Platform (DESP).  By running these use cases on the DESP, it will also ensure the active participation of user and provider communities in the DestinE initiative developments. These use cases will be implemented on various application domains aiming to support the development and demonstrate DestinE’s wide range of applications. End-users will be actively involved in a co-creation process. The winning consortia will also produce compelling stories that will contribute to DestinE outreach and promotion activities. In detail, this activity aims to achieve the following:

• Provide effective tools to support decision and policymaking at global, European and local scale, advancing current best practice and serving the needs of a wide variety of end-users. 
• Demonstrate the added value of the DestinE system (and DESP in particular) for users and other stakeholders, including policy and decision makers working in sectors impacted by environmental or climatic changes, or extreme weather. 
• Demonstrate the added value of ESA’s contribution to the DestinE initiative, using existing technological solutions in combination with DestinE outputs and the use of Earth Observation data and derived information. 
• Demonstrate that the DESP capabilities and services are fit-for-purpose and identify potential difficulties or limitations as early as possible. 
• Obtain the active participation of DestinE user and provider communities in co-designing and co-evolving DestinE capabilities, services and applications. 
• Establish a consolidated process for the continuous evolution of the DestinE Use Cases and the user community, by showing how third-party applications can be designed, developed, and maintained to take full advantage of DestinE’s evolving capabilities. 

About the Core Service Platform (DESP) 

The DESP is being developed by ESA and its contractors as the main access point for the Destination Earth system which includes the Data Lake (DEDL) and the Digital Twin Engine and first two Digital Twins. The DESP will provide applications, models, and simulations for expert and non-expert users to obtain accurate, actionable and significant information for policy and decision making in support of the Green and Digital transformation, leveraging applications in the field of climate change, energy, hydrometeorological extremes, wildfires, urbanisation, ecosystem monitoring, amongst many others. 

The platform combines generic and user specific services in a user-customisable environment to: 

• unify access to data generated or collected, referenced by DestinE, 
• provide applications to support development, modelling, analysis, and visualisation, 

• provide tools for carrying out simulations, data retrievals, data transformations, 
• develop and operate own applications and services, 
• share results, data, applications and libraries. 

The platform is being developed to be open, interactive, collaborative, performant, evolutive, attractive and extensible. 

 
More information about the tender 

This is a tender launched by RHEA System S.p.A. (RHEA) through the ESA-Star system, which maintains a full list of all Open Invitations To Tender (ITTs). RHEA has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) to lead the Destination Earth Use Cases project consortium and identify the initial set of end-to-end use cases demonstrating the capabilities of the DestinE infrastructure, in particular the DestinE Service Platform (DESP).

Please note that the information in this website aims solely to inform interested parties of potential opportunities related to Destination Earth. Full or more accurate information on the requirements, conditions and procedures are to be found in the main procuring agency’s procurement portal.