TransiT - Digital Twinning Research Hub for Decarbonising Transport

Lead Research Organisation: Heriot-Watt University
Department Name: Sch of Social Sciences

Abstract

Our vision for the TransiT Hub is to harness the transformative power of Digital Twinning, and associated digital technologies, to solve the most pressing problems of our age - the rapid and radical decarbonisation of transport , holistically, across all modes - Road, Rail, Air and Maritime, and at a national scale. The TransiT Hub will create a new interdisciplinary challenge-led national digital twinning capability to deliver scalable solutions of the integration and decarbonisation of transport, providing the thought leadership and coordination it requires. This is an urgent response to the climate emergency that will advance understanding of a complex and adaptive system, reducing uncertainty and risk for time-critical investments into sustainable, ethical and affordable decarbonisation. It will be centred on expert problem articulation of the challenges, ensuring planners, operators, and policy makers, will use this new capability to deliver national transformation and realise good climate, economic and social outcomes across the stakeholder community, as well as providing a blueprint for other sectors. While past approaches utilised small-scale, real-world trials and progressive scale-up, the need for rapid transition to a low-carbon economy, combined with the increasingly complex interaction between transport modes precludes this approach. This situation is currently holding back private and public investment and risking the UK's leadership in tackling climate change. Scalable digital twinning offers a way of quickly assessing and narrowing the decarbonisation options for the complex whole transport system.

To? realise our vision we will co-create 9 Federated Transport Digital Twins across modes and passenger/freight types, culminating in a Federated Transport System of Systems (FTSoS). These FTDTs will use novel capabilities to support the design, development, delivery and operation of a reliable, secure, resilient, inclusive, decarbonised transport system at lowest cost and delivering best value. We will use an active and agile learning-by-doing approach, that can adjust to stakeholders, withstand scrutiny, and feedback new knowledge to the next iteration.

The creation of the FTSoS will address a new paradigm of Whole System Digital Twinning - bringing together, coordinating and extending existing DTs in the sector, delivering capabilities currently unachievable within siloed mode specific DTs. Our approach addresses the challenges in interoperability, security and resilience, human-centred design, data management, policy delivery, and new business models, whilst leveraging existing DTs, and Cyber Physical Infrastructure, and growing national digital twinning expertise and capability. This will be shared with, and benefit from, wider national DT programmes, including NDTP and Energy System DT (ENSIGN), and other strategic investments such as DARE and the EPSRC Transport DT Network+, as well as linking with representative bodies and collaborations such as DfT's TRIB and the DT Hub.

The Hub will bring together seven distinguished higher education institutions, UofG, HW, UoL, UoB, CU, UoC and UCL that reflect a careful balance across modelling transport modes and the cross cutting themes essential for federated digital twinning including human factors, cyber security,? connectivity, policy, economics, and digital twinning tools. Furthermore, significant in kind support has been committed by external partners across government and industry partners, including the Department for Transport and over 40 organisations across the transport sector. Our foundational work will be explored through application focused use cases developed with our industrial and academic partners providing practical anchoring of the research; knowledge transfer through bi-directional secondments and the generation of evidence to support robust policy

People

ORCID iD

Philip Greening (Principal Investigator)
Christina Latsou (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2580-0277
David Flynn (Co-Investigator)
Cristina Tealdi (Co-Investigator)
Muffy Calder (Co-Investigator)
Xiaoxiang Na (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6524-7122
Dimitrios Pezaros (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0939-378X
Katharine Pangbourne (Co-Investigator)
T Lim (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8931-2745
Muhammad Imran (Co-Investigator)
John Ahmet Erkoyuncu (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8046-9911
Greg Marsden (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3570-2793
Katherine Sang (Co-Investigator)
Bernadin NAMOANO (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6159-5250
Maryam Farsi (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4549-0499
Yen Tran (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0009-0007-6169-9918
Guy Walker (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9852-1132
Christa Searle (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0382-4171
Michele Sevegnani (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6773-9481
Dhanan Utomo (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4232-5183
Paul Harvey (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1243-938X
Maria Luciana Blaha (Co-Investigator)
David Corne (Co-Investigator)
Ahmad Taha (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1246-8981
Zhongbei Tian (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7295-3327
David Cebon (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2828-6445
Blair Archibald (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3699-6658
Nishatabbas Rehmatulla (Co-Investigator)
Krishnan Guruvayur Venkateswaran (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8468-1055
Simon Shepherd (Co-Investigator)
Clive Roberts (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1518-2105
Dezong Zhao (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9848-372X
Tristan Smith (Co-Investigator)
John Easton (Co-Investigator)
Adam Gripton (Co-Investigator) orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9401-0722

Publications

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