Reply To: Digital Twins in Defence

Hi Iain,

First – welcome to the group!

Second – many thanks for this message, it is clear and thought provoking.

It has sparked a number of further thoughts in my head:

I agree with your observations about the defence sector being better at buying shiny new toys rather than cost-effective capability. I wonder how the Front-Line Command visions to in-Service implementations might be improved? Perhaps dstl could help with this?

Regarding joining-up the information sets in such a way as to support queries in the way you describe, I suspect there is a lot of (very worthwhile) work to do. I can see activity in thinking about the ‘digital backbone’ but I am not aware of the kind of approach that you are suggesting. Perhaps this is something we could raise with Caroline Boughton (Director Acquisitions and Approvals Transformation Portfolio)?

You raise an interesting variant on the definition of a Digital twin as being required to take a controlling role foe the physical entity (e.g. “The sensors around the building record the temperatures into the digital twin and the digital twin acting on what will be the optimum temperature for those living in that building will then adjust through actuators the HVAC system accordingly.”). I would be interested to hear the views about this from the Built Environment practitioners because most definitions put the controlling functions into the physical entity with the twin ‘shadowing’ it.

Your vision of the National Digital Twin is clear. I wonder about the complexity needed of the ‘circuit board’ to be able to support whatever is ‘plugged-in’ at any time? There is a lot of thinking going into Multi-Domain operations/integration so that many otherwise independent services (water, gas, police, fire, ambulance and armed forces) could unite to respond to national emergencies. It would be interesting for us to try that concept on those working in that area.

Your reference (https://tinyurl.com/ye7a5fp6) to the COMIT Reference work is very useful and I look forward to hearing responses to that work.

Your questions are ones that echo around the areas of interest and result in much debate. Your recommendations would benefit from being introduced into those areas to help focus thinking into ways of achieving the otherwise open-ended questions. You may be aware of the Team Defence Information (TDI) work on generating a roadmap for digital defence issues? It covers many of the topics you raise including Multi-Domain, lifecycle, supply chain, in-Service support and T&E. Participants are always welcomed, more information can be obtained by contacting Steve Green (steve.green@teamdefence.info) who is TDI’s project manager for this work. I will pass a reference to your document to Steve.

Finally, I hope that what I have said here is useful but I know that the defence sector is difficult to penetrate (the clue is in their name!). I wonder if you have any thoughts about what might be the next steps in progressing the ideas you present here?

Thanks again, Dave