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Digital Catapult > Programmes > UK Digital Twin Centre

Programme

UK Digital Twin Centre

Programme

About

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical asset, process, or system, bridging the physical and digital worlds. They turn data into real-time insights that can optimise performance, reduce costs, and predict outcomes.

Digital Twins operate through a fully connected data flow between the physical asset and its virtual counterpart. Real-time data from the physical asset—collected via sensors, IoT devices, or manual inputs—is continuously sent to the digital twin, allowing it to accurately reflect the asset’s current state, behaviour, and environment.

Delivered by Digital Catapult and funded by Belfast Region City Deal and Innovate UK, the UK Digital Twin Centre is making digital twins more accessible and meaningful in the UK. It will actively enable industries and innovators to safely embrace, explore and realise their dynamic power.

Operating from the heart of Northern Ireland, the Centre accelerates the adoption of digital twins to drive global competitive advantage for UK businesses. By creating the conditions for digital twins to be better understood, more easily developed and more meaningfully applied, the Centre gives businesses real-time capabilities to make smarter decisions and achieve better outcomes, enabling the potential of digital twins to be realised, not theorised.

Endorsed by industry, the Centre has with co-investment from three major industry partners: Thales UK, Spirit AeroSystems and Artemis Technologies to deliver an initial six use cases to demonstrate the potential of digital twins in transforming the maritime, aerospace and defence sectors. 

Removing barriers to innovation and adoption

To enable digital twins to be more accessible, better understood, more easily developed, and more meaningfully applied, Digital Catapult are running a series of programmes for all levels of industry – from SMEs to large adopters – to drive innovation and realise new value within their industry. These programmes will demystify, demonstrate and deploy digital twin technologies into real world industry

Providing reusable expertise, methods, and platforms

The Centre serves as a hub of expertise for key enablers for Digital Twin adoption. Developing, maintaining, and supporting a common methodology and platform for Digital Twin PoC/PoV efforts, with an emphasis on cost-effective transition to real-world deployment.

Demystifying, Demonstrating and Deploying digital twins

The UK Digital Twin Centre pioneers the development of open, safe, and interoperable digital twins. The collaborative approach involves industrial partners and leverages a wealth of domain-specific insights to foster innovation and overcome adoption barriers.

Register your interest for our first accelerator programme

Expressions of interest are now open for the first UK Digital Twin Centre accelerator programme.

This programme will support partnerships between tech SMEs and industry, to fast-track digital twin adoption in the maritime, aerospace, and defence sectors.

Alongside Innovate UK funding, you will gain access to mentorship, workshops, and specialist support to develop a proof-of-concept and help bring your solution closer to real-world deployment. This accelerator focuses on digital twin enabling technologies such as: IoT; data integration; simulation tools.

Applications will open in June 2025, with the programme commencing in January 2026.

Register your interest below

 

 
 



 

Industry Partners

Increasingly being adopted across global industry, digital twins can provide unique capabilities including rapid proto-typing and real-world control mechanisms, enabling businesses to make smarter decisions, achieve better outcomes, shortening time to market, reducing costs and lowering emissions. 

The necessity to accelerate industry adoption is demonstrated by the programme launching with three initial industry partners who are co-investing in the development of six use cases:

Partners

Our role

Collaborative Development

Industrial partnerships bring a variety of digital twins to life, tailored to diverse use cases. From these partnerships, distilling both the common elements and unique aspects of digital twin technology across different sectors. This collaborative effort has not only enriches understanding but also bolsters the comprehensive digital twin knowledge base.

Knowledge-Driven Innovation

The insights gained from initial developments serve as the cornerstone for our sophisticated, interconnected platform architecture. These platforms are designed to facilitate the rapid and cost-effective development of digital twin proofs of concept (PoCs) and proofs of value (PoVs), addressing one of the most significant hurdles to industry-wide adoption.

Enhanced Tool Access

The focus extends to integrating third-party tools through strategic technology partnerships, ensuring that our users have access to advanced resources. This integration supports the seamless creation and implementation of digital twins, providing the necessary tools right at the fingertips of practitioners and industry experts.

Digital Twin Engine
Digital twins image

Expertise and Methodology

The establishment of a dedicated team of digital twin experts and domain specialists has culminated in a methodology central to our services. This network accelerates digital twin but also enriches the ecosystem with invaluable expertise and practical knowledge.

Cost-Effective Scaling

We prioritise reducing the economic impact of transitioning from proof of concept/value stages to full enterprise deployment. By co-developing all assets and services with our deployment partners, we lower the barriers typically associated with scaling up digital twin technologies.

Standardised Development

Everything created within the centre will adhere to a commons development model. This includes everything from digital twin components to data management systems, fostering a standardised approach that enhances both integration and scalability.

Digital twin capability areas

The UK Digital Twin Centre’s dedicated team of expert technologists will support industry to meet their technology requirements to design, develop, deploy and operate digital twins across the six enabling technology areas:

Data Services

Integration and interoperability

Intelligence

UX and Immersive

Cyber Physical Systems

Security

Digital Twin programmes across the UK

The Digital Twin Hub

The Digital Twin (DT) Hub was created in 2020 by the Centre for Digital Britain at the University of Cambridge. In 2022, the DT Hub transitioned to a multi-sector Industry and Catapult Network partnership housed at the Connected Places Catapult.

It operates in collaboration with the new National Digital Twin Programme, run by the Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The DT Hub is a network for finding partners and collaborators. It is a place for learning and sharing experiences; for driving innovation, developing expertise and advancing the state of the art for digital twins. It identifies good practice, develops guidance and shapes standards on data sharing as well as showcasing the benefits of collaborative, connected digital twin endeavours.

Find out more

The National Digital Twin Programme

The National Digital Twin Programme (NDTP) was created by the UK Government in 2018 in response to the National Infrastructure Commission’s Report ‘Data for the Public Good’.

The programme is directly run by the Department for Business and Trade, in collaboration with industry and academia, and serves as a focal point to grow national capability in digital twinning. This capability will allow government, the broader public sector and other organisations providing services, to test decisions before they are implemented – drawing on right-time data from multiple sectors, understanding the implications and unintended consequences, and allowing freedom to optimise decisions for public benefit.

Find out more

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