Helping infrastructure owners to better understand the threats to their assets posed by extreme weather – and take appropriate action – are broad aims of new reports published by Connected Places Catapult on behalf of CReDo: the Climate Resilience Demonstrator, and discussed at a workshop held in London on 29 September.
CReDo is a project that shows how connected digital twins can be key tools in helping to protect infrastructure assets from threats posed by climate change. It seeks to understand the ways in which different pieces of public infrastructure closely depend on one another; pointing out that if one asset fails it can have a dramatic impact on several others.
Advocates of the project make the case that overall infrastructure resilience in the face of challenging climate events can be improved if a greater focus is placed on making investments in the most appropriate manner and adopting new technologies.
Until now, the focus of CReDo has centred around flooding and how using a digital twin and sharing data among infrastructure owners can help to predict how a major flood event could have an impact on the supply of power, communications and water.
Great progress has been made so far by Connected Places Catapult alongside project partners BT, Anglian Water and UK Power Networks to demonstrate the impact a connected digital twin could have on improving infrastructure resilience in a market town in Norfolk.
But the demonstrator is entering a new phase and beginning to expand in scope. Over the next year, the CReDo project will continue its expansion geographically as well as into new climate scenarios, namely extreme heat.