Belfast Region City Deal and Innovate UK have announced a £37.6m investment in a UK Digital Twin Centre.

In a step-change from traditional research and innovation centres, the UK Digital Twin Centre aims to accelerate industry’s adoption of digital twins through providing access to cutting edge technologies, reducing the costs of producing a digital twin and developing skills in the workforce.

The Centre will also provide a collaborative space for industry, academia and the public sector to foster cross-sector innovation.

Increasingly being adopted across global industry, digital twins are virtual models of a physical object or system which can be informed by streamed data from a real-world version or environment.

The digital twin 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 secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris said: “This is an ambitious project that will bring exciting opportunities for collaboration and accelerate the fantastic transformation Belfast’s digital sector is already witnessing.

“The UK Government’s £350 million investment into the Belfast Region City Deal will be used to support this project and ensure that we continue to make good progress across the City and Growth Deal programme, bringing even more prosperity to Northern Ireland, and ensuring it is the best place in the world to invest.

“I look forward to visiting the new centre once it is open and hearing more about the fantastic opportunities it will bring to Belfast and Northern Ireland more widely.”

To enable digital twins to be more accessible, better understood, more easily developed, and more meaningfully applied, the UK Digital Twin Centre will run a series of programmes for all levels of industry – from SMEs to large enterprises – to help drive innovation and realise new value.

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Indro Mukerjee, CEO at Innovate UK said: “As the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK works to support growth and increased productivity across the UK through our portfolio of products and services. The Innovate UK Catapult Network provides a unique combination of world-class expertise and facilities, connecting research excellence with business impact.

“This new Digital Catapult investment will accelerate industry adoption of digital twins, a key component of Cyber-Physical Infrastructure, delivering support for business innovation across the UK.”