The UK Digital Twin Centre has opened in Belfast backed by Digital Catapult, the Belfast Region City Deal and Innovate UK.
The project aims to accelerate the adoption of digital twin technology across the UK’s critical sectors.
At the Centre’s opening, the project’s co-investing industry partners – Artemis Technologies, Spirit AeroSystems, and Thales UK – utilised the facilities, including the 360-degree immersive space and advanced technology lab, to demonstrate how digital twins are helping to solve complex operational challenges.
These early-stage use cases emphasise the power of cross-sector collaboration to create scalable, practical solutions while building expertise that can be shared across industries, ultimately improving product design, building supply chain resilience, and decarbonising operations.
Programmes delivered by the UK Digital Twin Centre will help businesses across the UK to demystify, demonstrate, and deploy digital twins. With expert support, test environments and tools to experiment and validate, combined with shared learnings from industry use cases, it offers a practical route to adoption.
The Centre has convened capabilities across digital twins six enabling technology areas – intelligence, data services, immersive and UX, cyber-physical systems, integration, and security – to make this emerging technology more accessible and interoperable across sectors and suppliers.
The Centre’s first six-month Accelerator Programme, now open for pre-application expressions of interest, will support partnerships between tech SMEs and industry to fast-track digital twin adoption in maritime, aerospace, and defence.
Alongside Innovate UK funding, participants will also gain access to mentorship, workshops, and specialist support to develop proofs of concept for enabling technologies—such as IoT, data integration, and simulation tools— bringing their solutions closer to real-world deployment.
Expressions of interest are now open for tech SMEs and industry leaders ready to collaborate on real-world challenges on the first UK Digital Twin Centre accelerator programme at: digicat.org.uk/UK-Digital-Twin-Centre
