Draft:National Digital Twin Programme

The National Digital Twin Programme (NDTP) is a transformative initiative directed towards the development of a National Digital Twin—an ecosystem of interconnected and interoperable digital twins—for the United Kingdom. Currently, the NDTP is run directly by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), a change that took place in February 2023. Prior to this, from March 2022, it had been operating directly within the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

History
The concept of the NDTP stemmed from the UK's Digital Built Britain Strategy, announced in 2015, which presented a vision for the digital transformation of the built environment sector. Data for the Public Good, released by the National Infrastructure Commission in 2017, expanded on the aspirations of the 2015 strategic plan, introducing a timeline spanning 10 to 30 years for the development of a National Digital Twin.

The National Digital Twin Programme was officially launched in 2019 and its stewardship was taken on by Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB), a collaboration between BEIS and the University of Cambridge.

In March 2022, the NDTP was moved to be run directly out of BEIS and in February 2023 was incorporated into the newly formed Department for Business and Trade, following a departmental division.

Description
The National Digital Twin Programme is developing the standards, frameworks, guidance, processes and tools that will the support utilising the potential benefits of digital twins — digital models of physical assets, systems, or processes. These benefits will include better insights to greatly inform rapid decision making, improved asset performance and service delivery, increased asset resilience and improved response to incidents, such as flooding, or incremental events such as climate change.

The Programme emphasises creating an environment in which digital twins of various assets and systems can securely exchange and share data, leading to enhanced insights, optimisation, and predictive capabilities. It advocates for the adoption of common data standards, models, and protocols to ensure interoperability.

Significance and impact
Digital twins have the potential to revolutionise the way decisions are made, allowing decisions to be tested before they are implemented, drawing on right time data from multiple sectors, understanding the implications and unintended consequences, and allowing the freedom to optimise decisions for public benefit. The work of the National Digital Twin Programme is testing and demonstrating how these benefits can be achieved in real world scenarios while.

At the same time, it is creating the underpinning ‘rules of the road’ that will enable digital twins, individually and when connected together, to be appropriately safe and secure, to be trusted, ethical and sustainable and to be interoperable and adaptable. Ultimately this work will ensure that digital twins can be used to deliver improved social, environmental, and economic outcomes.

Notable achievements
A key milestone of the National Digital Twin Programme is the initiation of a series of demonstrator projects on the Isle of Wight, which commenced in July 2022. Serving as a test bed for the technology, these ongoing projects aim to explore the potential societal benefits of digital twins, including enhanced decision-making, optimisation of public benefits, and a focus on infrastructure resilience, emergency planning, responsiveness, and energy demand, use, and supply.

Under the National Digital Twin Programme, the CDBB established the Digital Twin Hub, a collaborative online community for those involved in creating, managing, and using digital twins. The hub encourages knowledge sharing, learning, and networking, as well as the development and adoption of best practices.

In November 2018, the CDBB published The Gemini Principles, a guiding framework for the development of the National Digital Twin. These principles have now been matured and work is underway to ensure that sufficient guidance is available to ensure that the key requirements of each are specifiable and measurable.