Twiinder

The problem:

The Twiinder concept was developed at Innovate East in partnership with Anglian Water and Mott MacDonald. It was developed during a sprint which focused on how we can increase collaboration between organisations and industries around Digital Twin innovation.

The solution:

The Twiinder concept aims to create a platform or framework that enables organisations to join together and stimulate Digital Twin development - enabling the sharing of the raw materials required to develop digital twins, such as data, algorithms, visualisations, knowledge and standards.

Where we are today: 

This project was awarded £5K seed funding following Innovate East to further develop the idea. Mott MacDonald was tasked with developing a high level framework.

We quickly learned that there was already a national group being led by the Centre for Digital Built Britain (the Digital Twin hub) that was looking to establish some of the same outcomes as we were and rather than duplicate the work, we decided to focus our attention in supporting the launch of the DT hub.

All three parties from the Innovate East sprint were part of the founding members of the DT hub which launched in February 2020.

Covid has slowed things down, but the aim is to grow participation to 100 active organisations as a first milestone, while the founding members stimulate the growth in maturity, content and knowledge of the platform.

The DT hub is supported by a Commons (academic thinking coming from Cambridge University)  looking at standards and frameworks with ambition to have a network of integrated infrastructure Digital Twins at a national level.