The latest from the Centre for Digital Built Britain

By Robyn Francis | Global Engagement Coordinator | Smart Cities Council

As the day ended on Wed 20th October at Digital Twin Week 2021 we heard the latest Digital Twin program updates from the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB).

The CDBB team provided an overview of their latest standards development work, culture program, national Digital Twin efforts and what the marketplace is doing.

First up, we looked at the Data for National Digital Twin program, starting with the Public Good program which was developed in answer to the National Infrastructure Commission’s Recommendations to:

• Deliver an information management framework

• Enable a national digital twin

• Align a digital framework task group.

Attendees were walked through the core approach, covering an information management framework (IMF), DT hub and Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) which is a tangible working example of the national digital twin. The Gemini Principles guide the project.

The IMF formed the basis of this years’ work - view more here. You can also look out for their managing key data framework which will be released soon.

Other great resources to look out for on the CDBB website:

• Skills and competency framework

• Developing a capability enhancement framework

• Findings from the legal roundtables on IMF / cross-organisational data sharing implications.

Looking at the UKs Digital Twin Hub, Samuel Chorlton shared what progress has looked like over the last 2 years, as well as the Hub’s short and long term goals.

On a fundamental level, the Digital Twin hub is a website with forum-like elements, much like our own, serving as a mechanism for serving the community and facilitating sharing, collaboration and enablement.

We then zoomed in on CReDo, looking at climate change adaptation digital twin capabilities across sectors through connected digital twins.

CReDo had two purposes - climate change and IMF, recognising that cross-sector data sharing can improve data resilience and that to connect datasets in a principled and scalable way, there is a need to develop and apply an information management approach. All of this works to develop future best practice through a working example.

Using the example of flooding, the team use climate and weather data to determine flood depth and individual asset availability, ultimately delivering systems of systems level outcomes and technical visualisation and decision support. Simply put, if there is flooding, where are the critical interdependencies across the system. Look out for the CReDo short film set to be released on the 2nd November.

The audience then had the opportunity to put questions to the CDBB team - but you’ll need to keep an eye on our news section as we share more learnings from the UK in the coming weeks.

A recording of this session will be made available on the Smart Cities Academy website on November 1 2021. Subscribers to the DT Hub will be notified when available.