Building momentum for a digital future – collaborating towards a National Cyber-Physical Infrastructure

This week saw the first get together of members of the Digital Twin (DT) Hub Board, Advisory Group and Community Council at an event hosted by Connected Places Catapult. The evening was themed around the launch of the National Cyber-Physical Infrastructure (NCPI) ecosystem – to build cross-sector collaboration for digital twin, robotics and metaverse innovations.

It was a chance to catch up on the latest thinking on bringing everything together, with a welcome and introduction from DT Hub Chair, Alison Vincent and a presentation on Building Sustainable Value from Justin Anderson. The event was compered by Henry Fenby-Taylor.

Justin set out future scenarios and showed how the NCPI can respond by building an ecosystem which is purpose led, by connecting cyber-physical system conveners to refine definitions, collaborate on shared building blocks, develop integration architectures and prepare to scale CPI across organisations and supply chains. And at the heart of this is giving those in different roles and at different levels of responsibility the tools to make it happen. Justin concluded with a look at the Digital Twins for Senior Leaders’ course, which begins with a pilot cohort on 26 October 2023.

With networking came the opportunity to listen to a fireside chat hosted by Melissa Zanocco with HVMC’s Jonathan Eyre and Cranfield’s John Erkoyuncu, and to discuss across tables the different challenges and themes central to enabling industry innovation across the cyber-physical infrastructure. Topics included governance, working groups, enabling infrastructure, initiatives including the Gemini Alliance and the Apollo Protocol, and NCPI federation with centralised services.

Guest speaker, science fiction writer Stephen Oram explained how the process of applied fiction can be used to create meaningful discussion between those who make the future and those who will live in it. What is important in this context is that we take the right approach to our cyber-physical future, together, and get this right from the beginning.

Thanks to Connected Places Catapult’s events team and to all our presenters and table hosts for making this a great evening of plans and possibilities.

Meet the Digital Twin Hub, its Board, Advisory Group, Community Council, and Operations Team.