CReDo report 1: Building a Cross-Sector Digital Twin

CReDo aims to demonstrate how the National Digital Twin programme could use connected digital twins to increase climate resilience. This first phase of the project investigates how to implement a digital twin to share data across sectors to investigate the impact of extreme weather, in particular flooding, on energy, water and telecoms networks. The current digital twin integrates flood simulations for different climate change scenarios with descriptions of the energy, water and telecoms networks, and models the interdependence of the infrastructure to describe the resilience of the combined network.

CMCL Innovations were engaged by the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB )and the Connected Places Catapult (CPC) as part of CReDo to develop a digital twin of assets from Anglian Water, BT and UK Power Networks. The digital twin combines a description of the logical connectivity between the assets with flood data to resolve the effect of floods on individual assets and the corresponding cascade of effects across the combined network. It demonstrates how to achieve basic interoperability between data from different sectors, and how this data might be combined with flood data for different climate scenarios to begin to explore the resilience of the combined network and identify vulnerabilities to support strategic decision making and capital planning.

The first phase of the digital twin and an accompanying visualisation were implemented on DAFNI, the Data & Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure. This report describes the use and technical implementation of the current digital twin. Recommendations are made for how it could be extended to improve its ability to support decision making, and how the approach could be scaled up by the National Digital Twin programme.

Visit the technical report page