Digital twin city blueprint to accelerate UK's transport decarbonisation published

Researchers have developed a new standardised approach to digital twinning for transport decarbonisation across road, rail, air and maritime transport.  

The team from Cranfield University says the new approach will help policymakers and industry by providing a common structure for organising the development of transport digital twins tailored to system-level decarbonisation across road, rail, maritime and air modes.  

The transport sector is one of the largest carbon emitters in the UK. In 2024, the domestic transport sector emitted approximately 77 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, accounting for 30 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions.

The framework is designed to incorporate emissions monitoring, energy efficiency analysis and carbon accounting as core capabilities rather than treating them as secondary features. The authors of the research say that this will allow organisations to test different decarbonisation strategies virtually before investing in real-world changes.

Digital twins are digital replicas of the physical world and are increasingly used in transport and other sectors for functions such as predictive maintenance and ‘what-if’ scenario planning.

The research was completed by a team from Cranfield University, which is part of TransiT, the national research hub made up of eight universities and almost 70 industry partners, and jointly led by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow.

Lead author of the research, Dr Maryam Farsi, who is a TransiT co-investigator and a senior lecturer in engineering optimisation at Cranfield University’s Centre for Digital and Design Engineering, said: “While digital twin technologies are increasingly being used in transport, it’s very fragmented, and most existing systems focus on specific areas or assets, like electric vehicle charging, traffic management or fleet operations. There’s limited interoperability between different modes of transport and few systems address decarbonisation.

“The framework we propose fills this gap by bringing together vehicles, personnel, transport infrastructure, processes, energy and data systems, climate factors, human decision-making and many other elements into a single, standardised digital environment.”