CREATING AND OPERATING A SIMULATION-BASED DIGITAL TWIN SERVICE FOR HYDROLOGIC FLOOD

Within the field of water engineering, digital twins represent an exciting new technology that offers opportunities within both simulation and visualisation to create applications that allow non-expert users (in water engineering) to visualise and hypothesise potential scenarios based on real-world situations allowing for both short-term tactical and longer-term strategic decision making and policy setting to be considered. However, digital twin implementation presents both developers and users with clear issues: what is and isn’t a digital twin, what is the scope of their functionality to typical use cases and how can real-world data be used as inputs for simulation and to drive hypothetical what-if scenarios? This paper presents the design, implementation and operation of a flooding digital twin for the ARSINOE project based on flood, traffic and cascading failure modelling for the Torbay region of Devon. Simulation results are presented through a Mapbox-based website, and considerations are given to future development steps.