WBGeo: A modular workbench to streamline geoscientific workflows

Structural geological modeling is often an integral part of larger geoscientific workflows. However, when creating these workflows, challenges arise not only in constructing models but also in the knowledge and availability of software, coding skills (especially for open-source solutions), and expertise across multiple domains. These hurdles hinder the exploration and comparison of various methods, compelling users to develop workflows tailored to specific scenarios that frequently require manual adjustments—making them difficult to reuse and labor-intensive.

To address these issues, we present a workbench for digital geosystems that employs a component and connector software architecture alongside both textual and graphical domain-specific languages (DSLs) to establish a modular framework. Within this framework, we define fixed interface formats for each workflow step, allowing components responsible for specific tasks to be interchangeable.

This design enhances workflow creation accessibility while promoting comparability and reusability. New components can be easily integrated into the workflow as long as they adhere to the established interface formats.

The current version of our workbench focuses on workflows spanning structural geological modeling, meshing, and numerical process simulations. Additionally, it incorporates integrated visualization capabilities in extended reality (XR), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) for each step of the workflow.

We will showcase the software architecture and DSL system through a series of simple models with an emphasis on structural geological modeling.