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The UK Digital Twin Centre has today announced a new cohort of academic-led research and development projects, bringing together leading UK institutions to tackle key challenges in the development and deployment of digital twin technologies.
The Digital Twin Academic R&D Accelerator supports collaborative, high-impact R&D between academia and industry, focused on accelerating the adoption of scalable, secure and trustworthy digital twins across sectors including aerospace, defence and maritime. The Alan Turing Institute and Cranfield University have joined the first programme as part of wider efforts to strengthen the UK’s leadership in digital twin technologies, foster deeper collaborations and supporting the development of digital twin solutions with real-world impact. Delivered by Digital Catapult, the UK Digital Twin Centre provides a national platform for collaboration between industry, academia and the public sector to accelerate the adoption of digital twin technologies across the UK.
The Alan Turing Institute is leading Project DARTER, an 11-month research initiative focused on enabling continuous assurance of digital twins in safety-critical environments, including air traffic control. It addresses a recognised gap in current approaches, where assurance remains largely static despite digital twins operating on live, real-time data. The work will support the development of continuous, evidence-based assurance processes, including automated data quality checks, model evaluation, drift detection and machine-readable evidence generation, enabling trustworthy and operationally viable digital twins.
Cranfield University is delivering an AI-enabled Digital Twin Operations (DTOps) framework for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), designed to keep digital twins continuously synchronised with real-world airspace. Combining live data fusion, real-time synthetic augmentation and persistent model evolution, the framework enables continuous cyber-physical compliance, security monitoring and high-fidelity 3D airspace modelling. These capabilities are expected to accelerate certification, strengthen safety assurance and support scalable deployment of Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations and Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) platforms.
The accelerator has a strong emphasis on collaboration and knowledge sharing across the academic community, including engagement with conferences and the wider research ecosystem, moving beyond theoretical research to deliver practical and transferable outputs that can support wider industry adoption including a final demonstration event showcasing developed solutions to industry stakeholders, a comprehensive final report, and open-access frameworks to support continued innovation and reduce barriers to digital twin development across areas such as integration, data services, cyber-physical systems, intelligence, and security and trustworthiness.
Find out more about the UK Digital Twin Centre here.
