CReDo phase 2: Technical Report – Distributed Architecture

Authored by CReDo’s technical partner CMCL, this report focuses on the implementation made to CReDo during Phase 2 of the project (April 2022-March 2023)

CReDo (the Climate Resilience Demonstrator) is a connected digital twin seeking to improve system-wide resilience across infrastructure networks against the effects of climate change. CReDo has incredible potential to make real world impact and scale across multiple use cases including different climate scenarios, different asset types and sectors, and geographical expansion.

At the end of Phase 2, CReDo has integrated data from 4 industry sectors: water networks (Anglian Water), telecoms networks (BT Group), power networks (UK Power Networks) and healthcare networks (NHS); and utilised flooding climate scenarios from Fathom (a water risk intelligence SME) data: coastal, fluvial and pluvial flood hazards geographically based in Norfolk.

This report mainly explores why and how the team moved CReDo’s data architecture from the centralised data sharing architecture used in Phase 1 to a distributed data architecture by the end of Phase 2, and then goes on to explore considerations for future phases of the project.

It documents:

·         Implementation of a distributed data architecture where asset owners can host their data assets in their own secure environments and CReDo can access the relevant data and return insights securely.

·         How the distributed architecture is deployed to enable extensible cross-sector sharing of data.

·         Generation of insights to facilitate decision support to improve climate resilience of the resulting combined infrastructure network.

The report utilises narrative, diagrams, tables and screenshots to take the reader through:

·         CReDo’s architecture and data structure

o   Hosting requirements and benefits of distributed over centralised data architecture

o   Building CReDo’s knowledge graph, and how ontologies have been used generally and for each sector network

o   Diagrammatic illustration of the overall knowledge graph

o   Relation between scenarios and datasets, and how that is viewed in the user interface

o   Locations of data components and processing functionalities in the distributed system

o   Visualisation and the user interface

·         Future recommendations

o   Summarising what has been achieved

o   How CReDo can be extended in the future

o   Considerations for what barriers may need to be overcome

Additionally, within this report you can also find:

·         An explanation of what CReDo is and what it seeks to achieve (p.2,3)

·         Objectives of Phase 2 of the CReDo project (p.2,5)

·         Source code under permissive open-source licence (p.23)