National Digital Twin Programme
The National Digital Twin Programme enters a new phase of collaboration with industry and academia.
The National Digital Twin Programme (NDTP) was created by the UK Government in 2018 in response to the National Infrastructure Commission’s Report ‘Data for the Public Good’.
The programme is directly run by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, in collaboration with industry and academia, and serves as a focal point to grow national capability in digital twinning. This capability will allow government, the broader public sector and other organisations providing services, to test decisions before they are implemented – drawing on right-time data from multiple sectors, understanding the implications and unintended consequences, and allowing freedom to optimise decisions for public benefit.
NDTP work programme 2022-23
In the next financial year, the NDTP will:
- Continue work on the development of the Information Management Framework and information interoperability
- Begin to develop legal agreements to govern security-minded information sharing
- Understand the need for and suitability of different visualisation tools
- Continue work on the development of the supporting security standards, guidance, processes and tools
- Engage with related work taking place across government, industry and academia
Demonstration projects
Demonstrator work is a fundamental element of the socio-technical change aspects of the Programme.
The first of these demonstrators is based on the Isle of Wight.
Isle of Wight
Work undertaken at the end of 21-22 financial year tested baseline ability to:
- Begin to combine information from multiple sources in a consistent structured format (ontology) and apply attribute-based security controls as required to that information where sensitive
- Layer digital modelling tools over the top of this combined information in way that supports user engagement with the information between and across sectors to improve asset resilience planning, management and responsiveness
Next steps
Work this financial year will build on this baseline to test and showcase the work of the NDTP in:
- Infrastructure resilience, emergency planning and responsiveness
- Energy demand, use and supply