Introduction
A pioneering new initiative in Digital Twins research and innovation.
The TRIC-DT mission is to carry out fundamental research relating to digital twins that addresses the most urgent challenges facing society and achieves real-world impact.
Digital twins offer exciting new possibilities across a wide range of sectors from health, environment, transport, manufacturing, defence, and infrastructure. By connecting the virtual and physical worlds, digital twins can better support decisions, extend the operational life of systems and services, explore different scenarios, and introduce many other efficiencies and benefits. As a result, digital twins have been identified by governments, professional bodies, and industry, as a key technology to help address many of the societal challenges we face.
Digital twins will play a crucial role in delivering solutions to the global-scale challenges, such as climate change, which currently face humanity. While DT technology has proven to be extremely powerful in a range of areas, current DTs are often highly bespoke, and their design, development, and deployment to address real-world problems often requires specialised expertise and computational infrastructure, which can create a barrier that limits their scalable use. The TRIC-DT, will work with key partners in an open and reproducible manner to democratise access to open, reproducible and trustworthy ecosystems of digital twins.
About
Digital twin technology is accelerating our understanding and prediction of complex systems in the natural environment, infrastructure, health, and other areas.
The TRIC-DT team is working across these domain areas and also considering how ecosystems of interconnected digital twins can be developed. There are multiple inter-related research and innovation challenges involved in this activity. These include developing innovative methods and algorithms for use in digital twins. In addition, questions relating to interoperability between digital twins, are key to creating ecosystems, and there are wider topics such as standardisation in methods used to collect, transfer and analyse real world data from physical twins, and integration with computational models to predict, control or analyse that system.
The TRIC-DT team are working in collaboration with a range of partners, and are aligned with delivery of the new Turing 2.0 and the Grand Challenge strategies.
This TRIC-DT mission will be realised by working closely with key development partners to deliver three interlinked objectives:
- Advance the science and implementation of digital twinning and use these advances to address important technological and societal challenges.
- Produce open and reproducible computational tools for digital twin design, development, and deployment that facilitate scaling of digital twins and provide these tools as a freely available resource.
- Build a multidisciplinary community of practice in digital twinning that democratises access to digital twin technology.
Organisation
The TRIC-DT will operate by delivering a programme of research focussed on three complementary themes of national significance, aligned with priorities of the Institute, and augmented by an interdisciplinary TRIC-DT Innovation & Impact Hub.
The three complementary scientific themes are:
- Natural Environment: enabling the mitigation of environmental change to support resilience.
- Infrastructure: enhancing the efficiency and resilience of critical infrastructure.
- Health: improving human health and wellbeing.
Research and innovation activities in each of these themes will be challenge-focussed and will provide concrete, compelling case studies that illustrate the power of digital twins, act as exemplars for interoperable tool development, and provide nuclei around which we will build a national digital twin research community.
Directors
The theme Co-Directors set the scientific and technical priorities of the TRIC-DT and directly lead and supervise research in their theme. The Coordinating Director ensures TRIC-DT is optimising its research and innovation against the wider Turing strategy.
- Coordinating Director: David Wagg
- Co-Director for Natural Environment: Kirstine Dale
- Co-Director for Natural Environment: Scott Hosking
- Co-Director for Health: Steven Niederer
- Co-Director for Infrastructure: David Wagg
TRIC-DT Innovation and Impact Hub
- Head of Innovation and Impact Hub: Chris Burr
The TRIC-DT Innovation and Impact Hub exists to support the development and sharing best practice for reproducible, ethical, collaborative and impactful data science for ecosystems of digital twins.
The Hub team work within each theme separately, and in the overlapping spaces between the themes to facilitate interoperability and democratised ecosystem practices.
The Hub team sit within the Turing Tools Practices and Systems Programme, and all are members of the core The Turing Way delivery team.
The Hub is responsible for supporting the TRIC-DT’s goal of democratising access to digital twin technology by providing open and reproducible computational and social tools freely accessible to the UK research and innovation communities. As such, a primary role and objective of the Hub will be to coordinate and consolidate research activity in the three challenge areas of the TRIC-DT, and ensure flow of tools, methods and techniques between areas, as appropriate.
The Hub will achieve this objective using a variety of complementary activities, organised into four broad (and interconnected) themes:
- Knowledge Commons: an open and accessible repository of skills and training resources and documentation to help researchers and stakeholders understand the digital twin ecosystem, including the development of exemplar case studies that can support communication, engagement and pedagogy
- Collaboration Infrastructure: development and maintenance of tools and practices, such as knowledge sharing events or research and innovation fora, to help coordinate research and ensure interoperability and usability of collaborative techniques between challenge areas, drawing on established Turing community-building processes.
- Stakeholder Engagement: structured and systematic identification, analysis, and involvement of stakeholders, including those that are under-represented within the digital twins ecosystem to support network and project management
- TRIC-DT Network Support: general services for the TRIC-DT network ranging from communication of events and opportunities (e.g. funding opportunities, events and networking) to regular check-ins and support functions.
Community members and stakeholders
The primary goal of the TRIC DT is to democratise access to digital twin technology. This places developers and users of DT technologies at the centre of our focus, to ensure we are designing and organising for equitable access. This would not be possible without close listening to our internal and external community members, and active collaboration with our national partner institutes.