Publication: National Digital Twin: Integration Architecture Pattern and Principles

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The Architecture Principles 

This document builds on the National Digital Twin (NDT) Programme’s The Pathway Towards  an Information Management Framework: A Commons for a Digital Built Britain.  Enabled by the Construction Innovation Hub, it specifies a set of principles and a redeployable architectural pattern composed of functional components for the creation of an Integration Architecture. This pattern, alongside the Reference Data Libraries (RDL) and the Foundation Data Model (FDM), will realise the National Digital Twin (NDT) Information Management Framework (IMF) vision.  The re-deployable pattern allows the publication, protection, discovery, query and retrieval of data that conforms to defined Reference Data Libraries and the Foundation Data Model. 

Three general architectural pattern options are explored (centralised, distributed, and federated), all of which could feasibly be used to realise the NDT vision. Although the immediate use case of the architecture is the management of information within the NDT context, it has wider applicability as a general data sharing platform, the core of which is a common data model supported by reference  data libraries to enable sharing of consistent data.