Fictional city demonstrates how digital twins can battle climate crisis impact

Centre for Digital Built Britain’s National Digital Twin programme has created an interactive demonstrator to show how having connected digital twins can help cities’ infrastructure recover from extreme weather events.

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The demonstrator is a click-through game that describes how a severe storm causes the river through Sunford City to overflow and knock out several utilities including telecoms, power and wastewater pumping stations. This also puts the hospital at risk.

The programme then presents the player three options for managing the situation, though each is hamstrung by limited data from other sources. The game then shows how having connected digital twins of all these pieces of infrastructure provides a clearer and more detailed picture of the situation. The player then has three more options for managing the situation, but they feature much more detail on what it would take and what the ramifications would be.

Through this simple programme, the value and power of digital twins is explained in an accessible and understandable way. This is helping to drive interest and support in the National Digital Twin programme, which hopes to build a connected network of the UK’s infrastructure assets to be used in real-life situations akin to that in the fictional Sunford City.

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