Like many companies Atkins, a member of the SNC-Lavalin group, is investing heavily in digital transformation and we all know that skills are a key enabler. We wanted to be clear about the skills needed by our workforce to be able to deliver digitally. The starting point was finding out what digital skills we have in the company. Then we could identify gaps and how we might bridge them.
But what are digital skills…and how do we measure them?
As we pondered this, we realised that there were many, many challenges we would need to address. Atkins is a ‘broad church’ comprising many professionals and technical specialisms. Digital transformation is challenging the business in many different ways. Articulating a single set of digital skills that reflects needs across the business is complicated by language, terminology and digital maturity. Furthermore, unlike corporate engagement surveys, there is no established industry baseline that we can use to benchmark our corporate digital skills against. To evaluate a skills gap would require an estimate of both the quantity and types of skills that will be required in the future – something that is far from certain given our industry’s vulnerability to disruption.
We knew we were trying to grasp something universal and not sector or domain specific, so this is the definition we decided to use: Digital skills enable the individual to apply new/digital technology in their professional domain.
That left the question around how we measure Digital Skills.
We did some research and explored several frameworks including Skills For the Information Age (SFIA), the EU Science Hub’s DigiComp and the DQ Institute’s framework. As we were doing this, we became aware that the CDBB Skills and Competence Framework (SCF) was being launched and we immediately sensed it could be just what we were looking for.
Why? Apart from being right up to date, it has a simple and straightforward structure and is capable to be tailored for an organisation. The proficiency levels are very recognisable - Awareness, Practitioner, Working and Expert - and it is in the public domain. But most importantly it seemed like a good fit because most of what we do at Atkins is in some way related to infrastructure and therefore is within the domain of digital twins.
But we needed to test that fit. Our hypothesis was “…that the CDBB SCF had sufficient skills to represent the ability of our staff”. We tested this with a survey, interviews, and a series of workshops.
In the survey we looked at how individuals from different groups in the company (differentiated by their use of technology) understood the 12 skill definitions and the extent to which they needed and used each skill in their day-to-day role. We also explored whether there were other digital skills that respondents felt were not recognised by the framework. We followed up the survey with interviews to clarify some of the responses and then used workshops to play back our findings and sense-check the conclusions.
Our overall conclusion was that we had good evidence to support our hypothesis, i.e. that the CDBB SCF was a good fit for our workforce. However, we realized we would need to bring the indicators to life so that users could relate them to their roles, particularly with people at the Awareness and Working Levels. This is not unexpected. Generally, people with lower levels of competence don’t know what they don’t know.
Another conclusion was that we needed a fifth, null competency indicator to recognise that not everyone needs to know about everything.
In terms of next steps, we are working with a supplier to develop an online assessment tool so that we can apply the framework at scale. We have rewritten the skills definitions and competence indicators to omit any reference to the NDT programme etc. although these were very minor changes.
We are working on ways to bring the skill level indicators to life for our employees e.g. through guidance materials, FAQs etc. We’re also developing an initial ‘rough and ready’ set of learning materials related to each of the digital indicators at Awareness and Practitioner levels. We expect the CDBB’s Training Skills Register to feature prominently in this!
Some of things we have parked for the moment are: (1) Moderation and accreditation of the assessments. Our first wave will be self-assessed only, and (2) Integrating the skills into role definitions.
We’re very grateful to CDBB for the timely creation of the SCF and I look forward to sharing our onward journey with the DT Hub community.
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Digital twins can help organisations achieve various goals. In some cases, the end goal is for buildings and infrastructure to last longer, use less energy, and be safer. In others, it is enhancing the lives of people who interact with the built environment and its services. As highlighted by the Gemini Principles, these are not mutually exclusive aims, so wherever you are on your digital twin journey, it is important to consider other perspectives on the hybrid digital and physical systems you create. How will your digital twin fit into a wider ecosystem that provides services to all kinds of people? How will your asset’s performance impact the wider built environment and those who need to navigate it? Whose lives will be better if you share data securely and purposefully.
In the first output from the Digital Twin Journeys series, the team working on the Smart Hospital of the Future research project, enabled by the Construction Innovation Hub, shared case studies from two smart hospitals and reflect on the innovations they saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this two video mini-series, the research team shares insights about how existing digital maturity enabled these hospitals to respond to the pandemic in agile ways, transforming to a hybrid physical and digital model of care distributed across multiple sites. They also explored how individual asset digital twins fit into a wider landscape of ecosystem services, guiding how we approach interoperability to achieve better outcomes.
These insights inform the way we think about the role of digital twins in the smart built environments of the future. Dr Nirit Pilosof reflects that, ‘Digital twin as a concept can promote the design of the new system, the design process of the built environment and the technologies, but also really help operate… the hybrid models looking at the physical and virtual environments together.’ If health care is enabled by connected digital twins, how could the design of hospitals – and whole cities – change?
In the videos, the team also discusses the limitations and ethics of services enabled by digital data and the use of digital technologies to improve staff safety, from isolated COVID wards to telemedicine. They frame service innovation as an iterative and collaborative process, informed by the needs of digital twin users, whether those are the asset owners and operators, or the people benefitting from the services they provide.
According to project co-lead Dr Michael Barrett, ‘The people who need to drive the change are the people who are providing the service.' After the COVID crisis, we can better recognise what we have learned from implementing digital services at scale, as more people than ever have relied on them. The team reflect that having the right people in the right roles enabled the smart hospitals in these cases to transform their services rapidly in response to the need. The same human and organisational infrastructure that is creating the smart hospital of the future is also needed to create the flexible, responsive built environments of the future.
Digital Twin Journeys can start from the perspective of available technology, from a problem-solving perspective, or from the perspective of users experiencing a service ecosystem. The smart hospitals project demonstrates the value of the latter two approaches. Hospital staff were instrumental in shaping the digitally-enabled service innovation to keep them safe and offer better services on and offsite, but project co-lead Dr Karl Prince points out how people accessing those services have to navigate a variety of different services in the built environment to get there. As we begin to connect digital twins together, we need to consider not just our own needs but the needs of others that digital twins can address.
For more on this project, including links to their publications, see the team’s research profile on the CDBB website. Keep up with the Digital Twin Journeys series on the CDBB website or here on the Digital Twin Hub blog.
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Anglian Water is an early adopter of digital twins within the water sector, working closely with the Centre for Digital Built Britain to help develop the market and showcase how digital twins can support an organisation’s strategic outcomes.
Anglian Water has a 15 year vision to develop a digital twin to sit alongside its physical assets.
From an Anglian Water perspective, the Digital Twin is essentially an accurate digital representation of their physical assets, enabling insight, supporting decision making and leading to better outcomes. Aligning the digital twin objectives to Anglian Water’s regulated outcomes, as defined by the regulator OFWAT, has been a key step in developing the business case.
With the initial vision and roadmap outlined the next step on the roadmap was to implement a proof of concept, to explore the value created from digital twins. Anglian Water undertook a discovery phase and a Proof of Concept with Black and Veatch for a Digital Twin back in 2019, and started to define how a Digital Twin would benefit the delivery and management of physical assets.
The discovery phase looked to understand the current landscape, further enhancing the vision and roadmap, and establish persona requirements. It proved vital to really understand the organisation and the impact on people during this early exploratory work.
The proof of concept looked at delivering three main outputs, focused on a pumping station to keep the scope focused and value measurable:
To demonstrate an asset intelligence capability
To demonstrate a visualisation capability
To examine the asset data and architecture.
Alongside the proof of concept other initiatives were kick started to consider how other elements of digital twin might add value, with a focus on more enhanced use of hydraulic models to explore how water networks could be further optimised. Anglian Water recognised early on that by integrating and enhancing many of the existing enterprise systems, existing investments could be leveraged and technology gaps identified.
Learning from the proof of concept and other early works Anglian Water looked to the next step of the roadmap, a scaled demonstrator on the Strategic Pipeline Alliance. The Strategic Pipeline Alliance was set up to deliver up to 500km of large scale pipeline, and alongside this to start defining and delivering the first phase of the digital twin. SPA has a 2025 vision is to deliver a large-scale, holistically linked water transfer resilience system. This will be operated, performance managed and maintained using advanced digital technology.
The SPA team set about developing a digital twin strategy which is based on the wider corporate vision and enhances the proof of concept work. The basic premise of the SPA digital twin is to integrate traditionally siloed business functions and systems, to deliver enhanced capability across the asset lifecycle.
As with Anglian Water the SPA strategy is focused on using the technology available and developing a robust enterprise, integration, and data architecture to create a foundation for digital twin. Taking this a step further it was decided to adopt a product based approach, thinking about the development of digital twin products aligned to physical assets, that could be re-used across the wider Anglian Water enterprise.
This whole life product based approach threw up some interesting challenges, namely how to build a business case that delivered benefit to SPA and also enabled Anglian Water’s future ambitions, taking a lifecycle view of the value delivered.
To achieve this meant considering and assessing the value to both SPA during the capital delivery phase and Anglian Water during the operational phases. This process also highlighted that certain elements of the digital twin deliver value to both SPA and Anglian Water equally and could therefore be considered as a shared benefit.
The resulting benefits register helped to identify the value delivered to the alliance partners which was vital to securing the delivery board sign off. As Anglian Water are a partner in the alliance, the ability to demonstrate value in the operational phase with SPA developing the technical foundation, was another key element in securing the investment.
As part of the overall process the SPA board were keen to see how the investment would be allocated, therefore the strategy evolved to incorporate the capabilities to be developed within SPA to enable digital twin. This helped to inform and validate the team for digital twin delivery.
With the capabilities and organisational chart resolved, a governance framework was put into place to allow the digital twin evolution to be managed effectively, putting in place the right checks and balances. This has included input and oversight from the wider Anglian Water team as ultimately, they will be responsible for managing the various digital twins long term.
To validate the digital twin against the SPA outcomes and objectives, the various elements of the digital twin were incorporated into the overall enterprise architecture. This has proved to be an important part of the process to ensure alignment to the wider capabilities and importantly ensure the right technology is in place. The enterprise architecture continues to evolve to include information objects below the application layer, again building on the product based approach, so that the enterprise architecture can be utilised in the wider Anglian Water Alliances.
In total the development of the strategy, business case and capabilities has taken 6 months, however it is important to note that this builds on the earlier proof of concept and ideation during the initial mobilisation of SPA. Given the approach a key next step is to work with Anglian Water to explore accelerated deployment of SPA digital twins on other major schemes, to put to test the product approach and maximise the investment made.
We have learnt from the early developments on SPA that articulating a whole life view of value is vital and that focusing on capital / operational stages is equally important, so that appropriate budget holders can see the value being delivered. We have also learnt the importance of having a bold vision which must be matched by clear definition of the first few steps, showing a long term roadmap for achieving an enterprise digital twin.
What is certainly clear is that we still have a lot to learn, however by following good architectural best practice and placing people and our environment at the heart of digital twin, we have put in place a good foundation from which to build.
If you would like to know more, please get in touch through the DT Hub.
Bringing CreDo to life
With COP26 on the horizon, we are fully immersed in preparing to showcase the Climate Resilience Demonstrator - CReDo. We have appointed two partners to help us communicate the story in an engaging and inspiring way and demonstrate the huge potential of information sharing.
Firstly, we are working with Crocodile Media to develop a short, dramatic film that will tell the story of a flooding event and how connected digital twins may provide a better response to climate disasters. The second partnership is with ESRI, a provider of online maps and 3D models of cities, who are developing an interactive demonstrator that will allow the public to test out various scenarios on a made-up city. The purpose of both will be to demonstrate how information sharing across organisational boundaries is a key enabler to improving resilience of infrastructure systems.
We have organised an event “Increasing our climate resilience through connected digital twins” on the 2nd of Nov to watch the film, see the interactive tool in action and find out more about how connected digital twins can help to tackle climate change.
We’re delighted that the project doesn’t end with COP26 – instead, the technical development of CReDo will continue until next year and will be delivered through a collaboration of research centres and industry partners; The Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Exeter, Newcastle and Warwick will work alongside the Hartree Centre, DAFNI, Science and Technology Facilities Council, CMCL Innovations, the Joint Centre of Excellence in Environmental Intelligence, CPNI and Mott MacDonald.
We are also delighted to be working in partnership with three major UK utility providers; Anglian Water, BT and UK Power Networks who are equally committed to making bold steps towards resilient infrastructure.
Progress on IMF’s seven circles
We have been moving forward with all seven circles of the Information Management Framework from top level ontologies, to integration architecture to information quality management.
One document I particularly want to highlight is ‘Managing Shared Data’, an exciting piece of work being developed by @Matthew West, Technical Lead for the NDTp. He is bringing together the lessons we’ve learned over the past three years since publication of the Pathway toward an IMF report and providing clarity on what it means for organisations to manage information effectively, an essential enabler for connecting digital twin. It is in development and we’re hoping to release the final document by the end of the year.
DT Hub
There are three main activities to highlight for October:
DT Hub website update. We’re keen to keep improving the useability and layout of the site so the new version of the DT Hub will include a public facing page, with all the resources to make it easier to access public documents. It also includes a page to host all information related to CReDo.
DT Roadblocks workshop series. As the community progresses on their digital twin journeys, it is inevitable there will be a myriad of challenges. The great aspect of being part of a community is that there are others who have faced similar challenges and can share their learnings or provide insights in to how to overcome your particular hurdle. Our first workshop is aptly named, “Problems shared, problems halved”. If you would like to be part of a constructive discussion, do sign up to this series, running until the end of the year.
Smart Infrastructure Index. We have just launched our latest SII survey to enable members to measure their digital maturity and benchmark progress against peers. When members complete and submit the survey, the SII will generate a personalised report including a score and targeted recommendations. The idea is that it enables users to identify areas for improvement and to support the prioritisation of future activities. The survey is open until mid-November and can be accessed here.
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How manufacturers can structure and share data safely and sustainably.
Manufacturers of construction products produce a significant part of the information required to bring about a safer construction industry, but currently, this information isn’t structured or shared in a consistent way.
If UK construction is to meet the challenges of a digital future and respond to the requirements of a new building safety regulatory system, it needs manufacturers to structure and share their data safely and sustainably.
There’s no need to wait to digitise your product information. Making the correct changes now will bring immediate benefits to your business and long-term competitive advantage. This guide will help you identify what those changes are.
Our guide helps decision-makers in manufacturing identify why supplying structured data is important, how to avoid poor investment decisions, safe ways to share information about products across the supply chain, and more.
The Guide https://www.theiet.org/media/8843/digitisation-for-construction-product-manufacturers-main-guide.pdf
8 Page Summary https://www.theiet.org/media/8856/digitisation-for-construction-product-manufacturers-summary.pdf
2 Page Key facts and Summary https://www.theiet.org/media/8856/digitisation-for-construction-product-manufacturers-summary.pdf
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Benefits of completing the survey
For individuals: Instant, personalised results sent direct to your email inbox; see how your score compares to the sector average and best practice; view your tailored strategic recommendations; identify which archetype you are (optimist, traditionalist etc.)
For organisations: Measure your digital maturity; identify what to prioritise; benchmark against the best
Why should industry complete the Index? Index insights highlight common challenges, recommendations provide solutions to these challenges; benchmarking helps identify best practice, case studies can be shared; industry-wide capability gaps addressed as a priority
Digital twin focus
The DT Hub and Mott MacDonald Digital Ventures have worked together to bolster the standard Index of seven categories, with an additional question set for those working on the delivery of a major project or programme, and a question set that revolves around digital twins. The digital twin questions are designed specifically for members of the DT Hub and ask about:
Digital twins
Customers
Commercial
Digital transformation
Asset management
Asset delivery
Asset performance
Continuous improvement
When members complete the survey, the Index will generate a personalised report including a score and targeted recommendations, sent straight to their DT Hub email inbox after completion.
Read the 2020 Index Survey Summary and watch the Interview
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the National Digital Twin programme’s (NDTp) weekly Gemini Call – an online progress update from the NDTp with a feature spot for members of the Digital Twin Hub to showcase projects and share digital twin knowledge and experiences. DT Hub Chair, Sam Chorlton, tells us about the call, its beginnings and the latest move to the DT Hub.
There’s no doubt that the Gemini Call has been a game-changing addition to the NDTp. Brought about by CDBB CReDo Lead, Sarah Hayes, we launched it in September 2020 as part of the Gemini programme to inform our friends and followers about programme developments.
In its early days, the call also played a major part in opening the dialogue for creation and delivery of NDTp projects, notably the Digital Twin Toolkit project, which resulted in a report and template package to help organisations build a business case for a digital twin. (We’re excited that the template has since been downloaded approaching 1,000 times.)
We could not have achieved the Toolkit project without the input of supporters across 17 DT Hub member organisations, and it was the members’ pro bono contributions and willingness to collaborate in this venture that enabled us to open up opportunities for knowledge sharing and discussions about digital twin journeys.
By the community, for the community
Today, the half-hour Gemini Call brings in around 60 participants each week, and over the year nearly 300 members have attended at least once. This year we have changed the agenda to allow for a feature focus by DT Hub member organisations to present digital twin projects or research, followed by a forum for Q&A. To date, there have been 16 digital twin presentations given by organisations worldwide. It is this free exchange of knowledge and open discussion between members of the community that is pushing progress on an international scale.
Sarah Hayes gives her take on the year, “We’re thrilled with what has happened with the call and we are telling everyone to come and get involved. We have over 2,000 members from government, public and private industry sectors and academia, and there is so much we can all learn from one another. Right now, there is a ground swell of connected digital twin development, and the DT Hub community can access this first hand.”
Gemini Call chair and Digital Energy leader at Arup, Simon Evans, said, “The call has been an excellent forum to bring industry together, whatever the experience or involvement with digital twins, and provide that regular knowledge-share and update on leading international digital twin developments.”
The Gemini Call sits centre stage within the DT Hub community as a member-focused exchange to help organisations increase their digital twin knowhow - it is a focal point for the community as we experience and drive digital transformation. Come and join the conversation!
Progressing by sharing challenge
One year on, we set this challenge to our members: invite a guest from your network to the next Gemini Call so we can expand the discussion and break down the barriers to sharing data.
Become a DT Hub member
Sign up to join the Gemini Call
An update from the Information Management Framework Team of the National Digital Twin programme
The mission of the National Digital Twin programme (NDTp) is to enable the National Digital Twin (NDT), an ecosystem of connected digital twins, where high quality data is shared securely and effectively between organisations and across sectors. By connecting digital twins, we can reap the additional value that comes from shared data as opposed to isolated data: better information, leading to better decisions through a systems thinking approach, which in turn enable better outcomes for society, the economy and our environment.
The NDTp’s approach to data sharing is ambitious: we are aiming for a step change in data integration, one where the meaning is captured sufficiently accurately that it can be shared unambiguously. Conscious that “data integration” may justifiably mean different things to different people, we would like to shed some light on our current thinking and present one of the tools we are currently developing to help us articulate the need for this step change. It is a scheme for assessing the level of digitalisation of data items based upon four classifiers: the extent of what is known, media, form, and semantics. The scheme entails the 8 levels below - which are likely to be finetuned as we continue to apply the scheme to assess real data sets:
Levels of digitalisation: towards grounded semantics
We trust that the first levels will resonate with your own experience of the subject:
Extent: as it is not possible to represent what is unknown, the scheme starts by differentiating the known from the unknown. By looking into the information requirements of an organisation, “uncharted territories” may be uncovered, which will need to be mapped as part of the digitalisation journey.
Media: information stored on paper (or only in brains) must be documented and stored in computer systems.
Form: information held in electronic documents such as PDFs, Word documents, and most spreadsheets, needs to be made computer readable, i.e. moved to information being held as data, in databases and knowledge graphs for example.
Semantics: the progression towards “grounded semantics” and in particular the step from the “explicit” level to the “grounded” level is where, we believe, the fundamental change of paradigm must occur. To set the context for this step, it is worth going back to some fundamental considerations about the foundational model for the Integration Architecture of the NDT.
From a Point-to-Point model to a Hub and Spoke model empowered by grounded semantics
A key challenge at present is how to share data effectively and efficiently. What tends to happen organically is that point-to-point interfaces are developed as requirements are identified between systems with different data models and perhaps reference data. The problem is that this does not scale well. As more systems need to be connected, new interfaces are developed which share the same data to different systems, using different data models and reference data. Further there are maintenance problems, because when a system is updated, then its interfaces are likely to need updating as well. This burden has been known to limit the effective sharing of data as well as imposing high costs.
The alternative is a hub and spoke architecture. In this approach, each system has just one interface to the hub, which is defined by having a single data model and reference data, that all systems translate into and out of. It is important to note, that although this could be some central system, it does not need to be, the hub can be virtual with data being shared over a messaging system according to the hub data model and reference data. This reduces costs significantly and means that data sharing can be achieved more efficiently and effectively. Neither is this novel. The existing Industry Standard Data Models were developed to achieve exactly this model. The new piece is that the requirement now is to be able to share data across sectors, not just within a single sector, and to meet more demanding requirements.
Thus, the National Digital Twin programme is developing a Foundation Data Model (a pan-industry, extensible data model), enabling information to be taken from any source and amendments to be made on a single node basis.
But what would differentiate the NDT's common language - the Foundation Data Model - from existing industry data models?
Our claim is that the missing piece in most existing industry data models which have “explicit semantics”, is an ontological foundation, i.e. ”grounded semantics”.
Experience has shown us that although there is just one real world to model, there is more than one way to look at it, which gives way to a variety of data models representing the same “things” differently and eventually, to challenges for data integration. To tackle them, we recommend to clarify ontological commitments (see our first conclusions on the choice of a Top Level Ontology for the NDT’s Foundation Data Model) so that a clear, accurate and consistent view of “the things that exist and the rules that govern them” can be established. We believe that analysing datasets through this lens and semantically enriching them is a key step towards better data integration.
As we begin to accompany organisations in their journey towards “grounded semantics”, we are looking forward to sharing more details on the learnings and emerging methodologies on the DT Hub. We hope this window into our current thinking, which is by no mean definitive, has given you a good sense of where the positive disruption will come from … We are happy to see our claims challenged, so please do share your thoughts and ask questions.
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Creating Digital Twins can be like sailing in uncharted waters, so how do you handle it when unforeseen challenges rock the boat? Can you even predict what kinds of things will disrupt your journey? We’ve noticed in various conversations on the DT Hub that no matter what sort of Digital Twin you’re trying to set up or why, there is an incredibly wide range of potential disruptions. From technical to cultural, from resources to supply chains, almost every avenue is susceptible to producing a challenge somewhere. Many examples that we’ve already seen have only become apparent once the people developing Digital Twins are up against them in real time, so that’s why the DT Hub has launched this new activity, Defining Our Digital Twin Challenges!
We would like to know about the challenges you’ve encountered on your DT journey in order to make the overall roadmap easier to follow.
The information you provide will help us to ultimately define our common challenges so we can start to solve them together. This series of thematic workshops, run by the DT Hub, will progress the conversation around the Digital Twin Journey, and surface some of the challenges that organisations are still facing whilst embarking on their journey. Each Challenge will culminate in an Activity, where we will present the specific challenge areas that you have brought to us to a select group in order to provide constructive feedback. The outcome of these workshops will be to share insights from inside and outside the community for the benefit of the community as a whole.
You can use this activity Bring out your Digital Twin Challenges to explore your challenges with others, and our crowd facilitator, Joao, will be interacting with you to make sure you get the best experience possible. Joao is a former market researcher, court interpreter and has been a brilliant member of our team for years as a 100%Open Associate. We look forward to your invaluable contributions, and in turn the exponential development of the DT journey.
Since its creation in 2018, the National Digital Twin programme (NDTp) has had three objectives:
Enable a National Digital Twin – an ecosystem of connected digital twins to foster better outcomes from our built environment
Deliver an Information Management Framework – ensure secure resilient data sharing and effective information management
Align a Digital Framework Task Group to [provide coordination and alignment among key players.
In 2021 and with the Digital Framework Task Group of senior leaders from industry, academia and government overseeing progress, it is at a point where key projects are being realised and support for its work is gathering momentum. Here is a summary of the latest developments.
The Digital Twin Hub community is now in excess of 2,000 members and its remit to create technical foundations and to provide a co-ordinated community in which to share expertise and knowhow on digital twins is being met with enthusiasm and support from a diverse range of participants across the UK and beyond.
This year is proving pivotal in terms of active engagement with our members to better understand their digital maturity and needs, especially through surveys, community activities and international summits. And in parallel is the publication of key documents and resources including the Digital Twin Toolkit and upcoming Collaborative Workshop to help companies make their business cases, and the Digital Twin Standards roadmap, a culmination of work by the British Standards Institute (BSI), which enables a framework for information management and sets out our programme for the next few years.
Key to these activities is the willingness of members from both academic and industrial fields to share their own knowledge and experiences. The DT Hub is launching a new series titled Digital Twin Journeys to focus on academic research and lessons learned from digital twin projects focused on construction: buildings, infrastructure and industrial, and satellite applications. In parallel, we will engage with industry to run a consultation on our Flex 260 Standards as well as a second Smart Infrastructure Index (SII) Survey which tracks, in the first instance, digital and organisational maturity levels of asset owner and operator members.
At the end of August, we also announced the launch of three thematic workshops to address Digital Twin Roadblocks by progressing the conversation and surfacing the challenges faced by organisations while embarking on their digital twin journeys. The aim is for members to discuss experiences and to elicit the main challenges and blockers encountered in their programmes to date. These monthly workshops will commence at the end of September 2021.
Our work on the Information Management Framework, to allow the smooth adoption of digital twin technologies, has also gathered pace with the introduction of a methodology to divide the information management space into manageable segments. The 7 circles approach provides the building blocks for informed decision making and will deliver better information management and information sharing on a national scale.
The NDTp’s CReDo project will be running a webinar on 2 November 2021 to coincide with COP26 to give insight into our plans to develop a digital twin across water, energy and telecoms to improve resilience across the infrastructure system. CReDo – Climate Resilience Demonstrator – is applying an Information Management Framework approach to share data across water, energy and telecoms service providers, combined with hydrology and climate data from the Met Office, to help plan for and adapt to the cascading effects of increased flooding due to climate change. Registration for the webinar will be opening soon.
The UK’s approach to delivering complex infrastructure projects is obsolete, leading to far too many projects failing to meet the expectations of their sponsors and the public. That was the conclusion reached following a detailed review commissioned by the Institution of Civil Engineers. I was lucky enough to work on the review that was published as A Systems Approach to Infrastructure Delivery (SAID) and published in December 2020.
At the centre of our findings is a call for a fundamental change of mindset. The review team, led by ex ICE Vice President Andrew McNaughton, concluded that even relatively small projects are now best seen as interventions into existing complex systems, made up of a mix of physical, human and digital components.
In this world, traditional civil engineering works, while still a large capital cost, only exists to support (or perhaps just keep dry!) these systems. It is easy to see that the system – not the civils – provides the infrastructure services on which people rely. More importantly, as Crossrail has shown us so clearly, the greatest sources of risk to a project now lie not in managing tunnelling or any other piece of heroic construction but in integrating and commissioning a fully functioning system – trains, stations, tracks, digital signalling, safety and communications, driver behaviour.
SAID proposes 8 principles for better projects that can shift the infrastructure industry in this direction. Principle 8 Data Oils your Project was built on detailed interviews with leading practitioners from inside and outside the infrastructure sector. Again and again we heard about the importance of all the project participants having access to consistent timely and reliable information. Client and owner organisations recognised that it is their responsibility to fix the data plumbing. This means having the capability to define what information is needed to deliver and operate the asset. It also means ensuring that the project’s systems convert raw data into meaningful information that flows to team members as and when they need it to make decisions.
Much of this is I think a no-brainer. What was really interesting was to see how thinking about data and digital is helping to generate a shift away from a traditional project mindset and towards a systems approach grounded in an understanding of the importance of what is already there.
Every asset owner we spoke to recognised that we are now firmly in a world where project deliver a cyber-physical asset. They also get that their digital twin can be the basis for a robust delivery and commission plan that integrates the project’s physical outputs into the existing network.
What was really interesting was to hear about the challenge of how a single project’s digital outputs can be effectively integrated into the existing cyber-physical system to create the kind of golden loop of information described in CDBB’s Flourishing Systems report of 2020. This would be real systems thinking, putting projects in their proper place in relation to the systems and human needs they are meant to be serving.
The response to SAID has been overwhelmingly positive. In response ICE has commissioned a second phase of work in which we are exploring the SAID principles with a series of live projects and infrastructure sector organisations. Later in 2021 ICE will be publishing practical advice on implementing the 8 principles based on the insight generated by these discussions. I hope that this blog can start a discussion with the CDBB network that will generate insight we can include in this advice and help the infrastructure world embrace a Systems Approach to Infrastructure Delivery
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The summer was marked by our milestone event, the Cyber-Physical Fabric Summit, which took place on July 19th. It was a huge success with more than 800 people registered, and close to 400 people on the live calls and a series of insightful roundtable discussions. There was a live Zoom chat running in parallel to the summit, with the comments every bit as engaging as the content. Each roundtable had a further thread on the DT Hub to ensure that others could catch up on the discussion.
The summit was not only useful in terms of pooling knowledge and ideas, but in creating movement towards the shared goal of developing an ecosystem of interconnected smart machines and digital twins. It left me feeling energized to hear from others who are equally excited about this journey and to have a cross section of academia, government and industry take part. The main takeaways for me were:
The need for boundary spanning leadership. Our speakers underlined the importance of taking an interconnected and collaborative approach to working across sectors, industries and organisations. I liked the analogy of an octopus – something that joins the intelligent tentacles and makes them work together.
Deep socio. In the same way that we have ‘deep tech’, there was a lot of discussion around ‘deep socio’ and ensuring the social side of creating our cyber physical fabric has equal weight to the tech side. There is a real need to address issues around ethics, privacy and commercial and regulatory requirements.
Creating and adopting in tandem. It was great to see so much consensus around the importance of adoption. We need to constantly be implementing the latest research, so we can test and refine as we go along.
Living labs. There was discussion around how we need to keep testing what we’ve created to really see what is working and what isn’t and what the impact is on real people. There’s a really interesting example taking place at MIT where their Living Labs programme is developing a scalable data management platform, allowing them to collect and integrate multiple types of data including: personal data or “small data” (collected by smart phones, activity tracking devices, or new wearable sensors); MIT data (wifi data, campus maps, event data etc); as well as external data types (social media data, transportation data, weather, city data etc). A further example worth following is the Smart Mobility Living Lab London where they are using smart mobility living as a test-bed for data innovation.
DT Hub
We continue to grow fast and have crossed the 2,000 member mark. We now have members from more than 1,000 individual organisations across 60 different countries. There has also been an increase in participation with many more new postings and threads being generated by our members. Do log on to add to the discussions! Also look out for our Flex 260 Standards, which opens for public consultation. Again we really value your feedback.
As we grow, so does our need for additional staff and I’m delighted to welcome two great additions to the team: @Kirsten Lamband @Catherine Condie. Both come with a wealth of experience and will be driving our communications and engagement activities across the programme.
CreDo Update
CReDo, the Climate Resilience Demonstrator, is a climate change adaptation digital twin demonstrator project to improve resilience across infrastructure systems. We launched a new DTHub page for CReDo where we will be sharing progress and the benefits of cross sectoral information sharing to improve climate resilience across infrastructure.
We are exploring examples of interdependencies map for infrastructure systems. Check out this thread and share any thoughts you might have.
An important part of our Credo programme is communicating the technology and research to a diverse audience in an inspiring way. We have tenders out to create a video and would be grateful if you could circulate the following with your network
In November 2020 DNV published the energy industry’s first recommended practice (RP) on how to quality-assure digital twins. Our new RP, which we developed in collaboration with TechnipFMC, aims to set a benchmark for the sector’s various approaches to building and operating the technology. It guides industry professionals through:
· assessing whether a digital twin will deliver to stakeholders’ expectations from the inception of a project
· establishing confidence in the data and computational models that a digital twin runs on
· evaluating an organization’s readiness to work with and evolve alongside a digital twin.
DNV’s RP intends to provide valuable guidance for digital twin developers; introduces a contractual reference between suppliers and users; and acts as a framework for verification and validation of the technology. It builds upon the principles of DNV’s Recommended Practices for the qualification of novel hardware technology and assurance of data and data-driven models.
Making digital twins a real asset
Physical assets are built to perform to the highest standards and undergo rigorous assurance processes throughout their life. However, there has been no requirement for their digital counterparts to go through the same procedures. Our new recommended practice seeks to remedy this issue as the technology begins a path of significant scaling across the sector. We believe it is time to prove that twins can be trusted and that the investments made in them give the right return!
The methodology behind DNV’s new RP has been piloted on 10 projects with companies including Aker BP and Kongsberg Digital. It has also been through an extensive external hearing process involving the industry at large. In addition, TechnipFMC’s deep domain knowledge and expertise in digital technologies and oil and gas infrastructures has made an essential contribution to jointly developing the RP.
A framework to handle complex requirements
The framework provides clarity on the definition of a digital twin; required data quality and algorithm performance; and requirements on the interaction between the digital twin and the operating system. It addresses three distinct parts: the physical asset, the virtual representation, and the connection between the two. This connection amounts to the data streams that flow between the physical asset to the digital twin and information that is available from the digital twin to the asset and the operator for decision making.
A preview copy of our recommended practice can be downloaded from our website: https://www.dnv.com/oilgas/digital-twins/preview-DNVGL-RP-A204-qualification-and-assurance-of-digital-twins.html
We’d love to get your comments and feedback on our work – and look forward to giving a short overview of our methodology at the Gemini call on 3rd August 2021.
Graham Faiz
Head of Growth and Innovation UK & Ireland – Energy Systems
DNV
Footnote: Who are DNV?
We’re an independent assurance and risk management company, part of our service offering includes the provision of software, platforms, cyber and other digital solutions to the energy sector. We have a specific focus on helping our customers manage risk and complexity linked to the energy transition, specifically their ongoing decarbonization and digitalization journeys.
Company website: www.dnv.com
Link to digital twin services: https://www.dnv.com/oilgas/digital-twins/services.html
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