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Tyseley Environmental Enterprise District

Powering local analysis through ‘digital twin’ development for better regional decision making.

The Challenge

One of the biggest challenges facing society is climate change and the necessity to transition to net zero carbon in all areas of modern life including energy and transport.

Working in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute and Birmingham City Council, the University’s Institutes in Energy and Data and AI, are responding to this challenge by developing a ‘digital twin’ which will have the potential to comprehensively model and test pathways to clean energy and net zero emissions within the Tyseley Environmental Enterprise District (TEED) of east Birmingham.

Digital twins have the potential to provide cities with a bridge between the real and digital world, where smart buildings and infrastructure share information with a virtual environment, creating huge potential to accelerate decarbonisation.

This collaboration between Turing and the University of Birmingham has the opportunity to both support and inform the national dialogue on other issues broader issues of systems resilience, climate change and levelling up.

An aerial view of Tyseley Energy Park and the surrounding area

Collaboration to make progress

As a member of the Turing University Network, Turing Science of Cities and Regions Programme sponsored a project work which took a digital capture of the TEED area using light aircraft and used this imagery to create a ‘Point Cloud’ – a large set of data points in a 3D coordinate system, where each point represents a specific location in space and contains position, colour, and intensity. From this, a Digital Model was derived compiled from 3D geospatial datasets and overlaid with electricity networks and transport data, creating a graphical interactive Demonstrator that can be engaged with via iPad. This project builds on a Feasibility study (12.1MB PDF) released in 2022 developed through co-creation workshops with a range of stakeholders, this study explored potential use cases for a digital twin alongside the ‘pains and gains’ for different personas e.g. SME business owner, a resident, an investor.

This project moves us one step closer to having a fully interactive digital twin which could allow residents, businesses and policy makers to understand the region in much more detail and make informed decision based on simulated scenarios to discover the impact of different technologies, industrial and transport policies before they are implemented.

To make progress on this challenge, collaboration between partners is central. As part of the project, in summer 2023 an event convened regional and national representative to share learning from the project and other case studies, exploring the social, technological and infrastructure challenges of creating and implementing urban analytics tools.

Next steps

Given the aspiration to develop a digital twin to enable decarbonisation within Birmingham, starting with the TEED area, this project moves a step closer with the funding secured through the DIATOMIC Accelerator programme led by the Connected Places Catapult. Diatomic is designed to harness the region’s knowledge base in digital technologies, helping to bolster innovation and R&D capacity to spark commercial growth and investment. As part of this, the University of Birmingham team is working with external partners to procure a baseframe which will form the basis for the future digital twin

Other project collaborators include MAADDIGITAL and Siemens.

One of the biggest challenges facing society is climate change and the necessity to transition to net zero carbon in all areas of modern life including energy and transport. Working in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute and Birmingham City Council, the University’s Institutes in Energy and Data and AI are responding to this challenge by developing a ‘digital twin’ which will have the potential to comprehensively model and test pathways to clean energy and net zero emissions within the Tyseley Environmental Enterprise District (TEED) of east Birmingham. Partners and stakeholders recently attended an event at The Exchange to explore this topic further by building networks, presenting ideas and sharing their earning.

Birmingham Urban Analytics and Digital Twin, Turing Engagement Event

Transcript

So Diatomic builds on some really great work that the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University and Aston University been doing around Digital Twin development, which is why we're here today. We're also building on some successful international relationships that Birmingham as a city and the West Midlands want to build.

We are part of a team that is supporting the city to accelerate inclusive economic growth, opportunities for the city using digital data and technology. Our focus is to enable Birmingham to be recognised as a leading digital city for innovation, for experimentation and ultimately position it and being recognised across the world as a leading digital city. And all these universities have got this great initiative for research.

Different research groups, different collaboration with different companies, and events like this are going to help to build that bridge between different universities, at least within the region.

The more talks I'm attending today, the more I'm realising that we're all doing kind of the same thing. So we can work together very easily and we can share resources, share information, share knowledge.

So I think events like this are very important just to enlighten everyone really. Events like today are sort of instrumental to the Turing Institute and to the university to actually interface and connect with the people that we do the work for.

We don't do it in isolation. We do it for, in this case, in particular the region of Birmingham. And we have an Urban Digital Twin for East Birmingham, and that will help the population. It's really important to have events like this where people with different disciplines come together and they can work together and brainstorm.

So it's very obvious that we cannot achieve our goal of net zero carbon emission with only one single discipline. We were commissioned to do the 3D capture the Digital Twin for the Tysley area. So we were responsible for the coordination of that capture and then the outputs for the deliverables so that everyone could then build and layer data on top of a model.

So the Turing Institute has been a vital component of development of the first stage of that Digital Twin. They have funded a programme of work which is to do a digital capture, create a point cloud of East Birmingham, and then to fund some activity which is capturing the energy infrastructure and the transport infrastructure in that part of the city.