Digital Twin Journeys: An iterative approach to prototyping digital twins

Embarking on a digital twin journey can help you better understand a problem and provide insights that can help you solve a problem. This infographic is a guide to capturing value through prototyping digital twins, based on lessons learned from the digital twin research delivered by the Centre for Digital Built Britain in partnership with the Construction Innovation Hub and undertaken by the University of Cambridge. Please visit https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/research/digital-twin-journeys for more information about this research programme

Climate Change and COP26: Are Digital Technologies and Information Management Part of the Problem or the Solution? An Editorial Reflection and Call to Action

The UN COP26 2021 conference on climate change offers the chance for world leaders to take action and make urgent and meaningful commitments to reducing emissions and limit global temperatures to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Whilst the political aspects and subsequent ramifications of these fundamental and critical decisions cannot be underestimated, there exists a technical perspective where digital and IS technology has a role to play in the monitoring of potential solutions, but also an integral element of climate change solutions. We explore these aspects in this editorial article, offering a comprehensive opinion based insight to a multitude of diverse viewpoints that look at the many challenges through a technology lens. It is widely recognized that technology in all its forms, is an important and integral element of the solution, but industry and wider society also view technology as being part of the problem. Increasingly, researchers are referencing the importance of responsible digitalization to eliminate the significant levels of e-waste. The reality is that technology is an integral component of the global efforts to get to net zero, however, its adoption requires pragmatic tradeoffs as we transition from current behaviors to a more climate friendly society

Climate and colonialism

Recent years have seen a growth in scholarship on the intertwined histories of climate, science and European imperialism. Scholarship has focused both on how the material realities of climate shaped colonial enterprises, and on how ideas about climate informed imperial ideologies. Historians have shown how European expansion was justified by its protagonists with theories of racial superiority, which were often closely tied to ideas of climatic determinism. Meanwhile, the colonial spaces established by European powers offered novel ‘laboratories’ where ideas about acclimatisation and climatic improvement could be tested on the ground. While historical scholarship has focused on how powerful ideas of climate informed imperial projects, emerging scholarship in environmental history, history of science and historical geography focuses instead on the material and cognitive practices by which the climates of colonial spaces were made known and dealt with in fields such as forestry, agriculture and human health. These heretofore rather disparate areas of historical research carry great contemporary relevance of studies of how climates and their changes have been understood, debated and adapted to in the past

Climate change and COP26: Are digital technologies and information management part of the problem or the solution? An editorial reflection and call to action

The UN COP26 2021 conference on climate change offers the chance for world leaders to take action and make urgent and meaningful commitments to reducing emissions and limit global temperatures to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Whilst the political aspects and subsequent ramifications of these fundamental and critical decisions cannot be underestimated, there exists a technical perspective where digital and IS technology has a role to play in the monitoring of potential solutions, but also an integral element of climate change solutions. We explore these aspects in this editorial article, offering a comprehensive opinion based insight to a multitude of diverse viewpoints that look at the many challenges through a technology lens. It is widely recognized that technology in all its forms, is an important and integral element of the solution, but industry and wider society also view technology as being part of the problem. Increasingly, researchers are referencing the importance of responsible digitalization to eliminate the significant levels of e-waste. The reality is that technology is an integral component of the global efforts to get to net zero, however, its adoption requires pragmatic tradeoffs as we transition from current behaviors to a more climate friendly society.</p

Digital Twin Journeys: Sensors and sensibility

When we travel by train, we expect that we will arrive at our destination safely and on time. Safety and performance of their service network is therefore a key priority for Network Rail. Our latest video in the Digital Twin Journeys series tells the story of how researchers have inherited two intensively instrumented bridges and are transforming that high volume and velocity of data into a digital twin showing the wear and pressures on the bridges, as well as other information that can help the asset owners predict when maintenance will be required and meet their key priorities

Digital Twin Journeys: Coffee time

Sensor technology has come a long way over the last 30 years, from the world’s first, bulky webcam at the University of Cambridge Computer Science Department to near ubiquitous networks of sleek sensors that can provide data at an unprecedented volume, velocity and quality. Today, sensors can even talk to each other to combine single points of data into useful insights about complex events. The new webcomic ‘Coffee Time’ by Dave Sheppard, part of the Digital Twin Journeys series, tells the story of this evolution and what it means for what we can learn about our built environment through smart sensors

Digital Twin Journeys: Understanding the information need - a bridge to better information management

Digital twins enable asset owners to use better information at the right time to make better decisions. Exploring the early stages of a digital twin journey – understanding the information need – are Staffordshire Bridges researcher Dr Farhad Huseynov and Head of Information Management Henry Fenby-Taylor

Digital Twin Journeys: Digital twins from space

We all want the built environment to be safe and to last. However, minor movements over time from forces such as subsidence can impact these outcomes. It can also make connecting and modifying assets harder if they have drifted from the position in which they were built. If the assets are remote or hard to access, this makes tracking these small movements even more difficult. In the latest video from the Digital Twin Journeys series, the Construction Innovation Hub-funded Satellites research group tells the construction and built environment sectors what they need to know about remote sensing and using satellite data

Digital Twin Journeys: Data ingestion

The research team for the West Cambridge Digital Twin project has developed a digital twin that allows various formats of building data to function interoperably, enabling better insights and optimisation for asset managers and better value per whole life Pound. The graphic centres the asset manager as a decision maker as a vital part of this process, and illustrates that each iteration improves the classification and refinement of the data. It also highlights challenges and areas for future development, showing that digital twin development is an ongoing journey, not finite destination