Led by: Thames Water
Partners: Severn Trent, National Digital Twin Programme
See project updates on the Thames Water website.
A ‘digital twin’ is a virtual representation of a water company’s physical assets or processes, for example a digital version of its pipe network and water treatment process. Water companies use these digital twins to unlock new data-driven innovations, which can improve their services and how they manage their networks for the benefit of customers. More companies are using digital twins but there is no agreed standard model and process for creating them, which has the potential to create inefficiencies, reduce the value delivered by these systems and increase costs. This project will create standards to support consistent digital twins throughout the industry.
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We’re excited to report that the project is moving forward smoothly. We now have access to detailed location data about the water systems from Thames Water and Severn Trent. Our team has turned this data into formats that our computer models can easily understand. This information has helped us improve our model of Severn Trent’s network, and we’re making sure the model is flexible enough to work with other systems too. We’re building a special tool to help with this, and we’ll be sharing it publicly. This tool will make it easier for others to create their own “digital twin” models of water systems. We’re on schedule to complete the final stage of the project, which will allow us to create a visual representation of the water network. This visualisation will be easy to use and adapt for different purposes.
