Building Digital Twins for Operational Technology Resilience
Case study from Ian Griffiths, CEO of Aeris-UK, and Ben Byfield, Principal Consultant at Actica Consulting, exploring the future of digital twins for Operational Technology.
Introduction
Operational Technology (OT) underpins some of the most critical services in society, from infrastructure and manufacturing to defence and national security. Yet OT systems are often highly interconnected, complex and vulnerable to disruptions that can cascade through their dependencies. As the UK seeks to strengthen its resilience and drive innovation in digital infrastructure, the concept of digital twins for OT systems offers new opportunities.
Digital twins allow organisations to create dynamic, data-driven models of real-world assets, enabling better risk management, smarter interventions and enhanced operational assurance. However, OT environments present unique challenges. Systems are often bespoke, have long working lives, lack comprehensive telemetry and must account for physical, cyber and operational interdependencies.
At Aeris-UK and Actica Consulting, we have been developing approaches that bridge this gap. Our work on SATORI, funded by Defence Digital’s Cyber Resilience Programme through the Defence and Security Accelerator’s (DASA’s) ‘Reducing Cyber Risk Across Defence’ themed competition, offers a strong foundation for OT digital twins.
Working together, we developed a flexible simulation framework based on a novel Event-driven Dependency and Response Graph (EDRG) approach. This enables users to map components, model dependencies, simulate cascading failures and explore system behaviour under uncertainty. Critically, it allows analysis even when full real-time data feeds are not available, supporting resilience planning, intervention testing and operational risk analysis.
The Need for OT Digital Twins
OT in sectors such as defence, energy, transport and manufacturing faces distinct risks. Systems are long-lived, physically located, often built on legacy technologies and deeply entwined with IT. Failures can cause immediate safety issues or mission-critical effects.
Real-world incidents illustrate the importance of anticipating cascading vulnerabilities. In March 2025, a fire at an electrical substation near Heathrow Airport led to widespread disruption. The fire disabled both the substation and its backup systems, cutting power to the UK’s busiest airport and resulting in the cancellation of over 1,300 flights. Although contingency plans existed, the complexity of dependencies meant that restoring operations was delayed. A predictive digital twin of the infrastructure could have modelled such cascading effects, informed contingency planning and accelerated recovery, or shown where recovery was already possible.
These challenges emphasise why dynamic, system-level modelling is vital. Static diagrams or isolated risk registers cannot fully capture how failures propagate across complex, interdependent OT systems. Digital twins for OT need to be capable of managing uncertainty, simulating different conditions and supporting proactive decision-making.
Building Practical and Predictive OT Twins
SATORI provides a template for how OT digital twins could evolve. It focuses on:
Capturing Dependencies and Responses: Using our Event-driven Dependency and Response Graph (EDRG) approach, systems are modelled not only by their components but by how they respond to events and interact under disruption.
Enabling Simulation under Uncertainty: Even when perfect data is not available, Monte Carlo sampling and event-driven simulation allow exploration of different operational futures. By abstracting detail, simulation and testing can begin even where the full details of the OT being modelled are not understood, allowing an iterative approach to modelling to deliver value early.
Supporting Intervention Planning: Users can model potential changes to the system, test how it would behave and identify mitigation strategies before making real-world interventions.
Adaptability: The framework is designed to be extensible; it can represent different types of OT systems from tactical communication networks to manufacturing plants.
Integration Readiness: With further development, SATORI-like frameworks could link to live sensor feeds, enabling predictive maintenance, anomaly detection and real-time resilience analysis. Further opportunities exist to integrate AI techniques such as machine learning for predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and reinforcement learning to optimise adaptive responses.
Rather than aiming for a perfect real-time replica, the focus is on building digital twins that are predictive, adaptive and decision-ready. They should help planners and operators understand where the risks concentrate, what intervention options are available and what consequences different decisions may have.
Moving Forward: Priorities for Digital Twin Development
To realise the potential of digital twins in OT, there are several key priorities:
Managing Uncertainty: Techniques to model and combine uncertainty must be integral, allowing decision-makers to act even with incomplete data.
Operational Usability: Twins must be accessible to analysts and operators; sophisticated models that are not transparent or usable will not deliver value.
Iterative Development: Modelling a complex system from the ground up is a complex and lengthy process; Twins must be able to handle abstraction to enable analysts and operators to deliver value early and proactively decide where modelling effort should focus.
Flexible Integration: Twins should integrate with existing data sources and systems but not be wholly dependent on full real-time data to function.
Scenario Testing and Decision Support: Building the ability to run ‘what if’ scenarios rapidly to support planning, resilience improvement and real-time incident response.
The Heathrow substation incident shows that even with backup plans, cascading effects across complex infrastructure can be hard to predict and manage. Digital twins of OT offer a way to move from reacting to failures towards designing more resilient, adaptive systems.
At Aeris-UK and Actica Consulting, we are excited to contribute to shaping the future of digital twins for critical infrastructure and operational resilience. Building on our experience with SATORI, we believe that predictive, decision-focused twins will be central to protecting the systems that underpin modern society. Developing these capabilities will also be crucial for the UK to strengthen its leadership in resilient digital infrastructure and next-generation Digital Twin innovation.
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