We’ve got two fresh government publications to point you to — both highly relevant to anyone building or operating digital twins for UK infrastructure and transport.
- Infrastructure digital twins: data requirements – a Department for Transport (DfT) report produced by Mott MacDonald that spells out the information you actually need in a twin if you want to defend assets against ageing, climate change and evolving cyber risks.
Source: GOV.UK – Infrastructure digital twins: data requirements - FUSION project: multimodal transport user data – a DfT study that tracked real people across modes to give richer, behavioural data for transport modelling and user-centred twins.
Source: GOV.UK – FUSION project: multimodal transport user data
Taken together, they cover both sides of the twin story: the asset and resilience view, and the user and demand view.
1) Announcement: Infrastructure digital twins – data requirements for whole-life efficiency and resilience
The Department for Transport has published research showing how digital twin technology can be used to protect UK infrastructure against the risks we’re all designing for now: ageing assets, climate change, utilities dependencies and emerging cybersecurity threats. It’s one of the clearest government-backed articulations this year of what data we actually need in the twin to make whole-life decisions.
The report:
- defines a digital twin in line with UK practice — a virtual model connected to the real asset via 2-way, right-time data so you can test decisions before making them;
- shows how that connection lets owners understand asset condition, when to intervene for maintenance or renewal, and how to guide future design;
- builds an evidence base for using more advanced twins in infrastructure management, not just visualisations;
- was produced for DfT by Mott MacDonald, acting as the department’s Futures Advisor.
It’s especially useful for organisations looking at bridges, ports, rail stations and airports, because the research worked through different asset types and the 12 key acute/chronic risks they face — then mapped the baseline data a twin needs before you can start doing more advanced resilience analysis.
Call to action (publish this with the article):
➡️ Read the full report on GOV.UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/infrastructure-digital-twins-data-requirements
2) Announcement: FUSION project – multimodal transport user data for smarter twins and modelling
On the same day, DfT also released FUSION: multimodal transport user data — a large behavioural data project where about 3,500 participants completed surveys and used a mobile app to track how they actually travel over 6 months. It’s designed to feed analysis, transport modelling, policy evaluation and strategy development — exactly the inputs twin teams need when they want their model to reflect real passenger choices, not assumptions.
What’s in it:
- multimodal journey data so you can see how people chain rail, bus, micromobility and walking;
- disruption insights — how behaviour shifts when the network isn’t working perfectly;
- demographic/persona breakdowns to support user-centred service design;
- anonymised/aggregated data plus the survey instruments and dashboard code via the EPSRC Geographic Data Service, so digital and GIS teams can experiment without recreating the pipeline.
This is a great feed for city-region transport authorities, MaaS teams, mobility platform providers and anyone building a transport-layer digital twin who wants to calibrate demand with UK-specific, recent data.
Call to action (publish this with the article):
➡️ Download the FUSION summary and access data via GOV.UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fusion-project-multimodal-transport-user-data
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