Centre for Digital Built Britain


The Centre for Digital Built Britain is a UK government-funded body, established in partnership with Cambridge University in 2017, to support the transformation of the UK construction sector using digital technologies to better design, build, maintain, integrate and use the built environment. It is a successor to the UK BIM Task Group.
The CDBB is responsible for the 'National Digital Twin' programme.

History

In May 2011 UK Government Chief Construction Adviser Paul Morrell called for adoption of building information modelling on UK government construction projects. The UK BIM Task Group was a UK Government-funded group, managed through the Cabinet Office, and created in 2011. Chaired by Mark Bew, it was founded to "drive adoption of BIM across government" in support of the Government Construction Strategy. It led the government's BIM programme and requirements, including a free-to-use set of UK standards and tools that defined 'level 2 BIM'. The BIM Task Group later took responsibility for delivering the Digital Built Britain strategy, published in February 2015.
The work of the BIM Task Group now continues under the stewardship of the Cambridge-based Centre for Digital Built Britain, announced by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in December 2017 and formally launched in early 2018. Its role is to support the transformation of the UK's construction sector using digital technologies to better plan, build, maintain and use infrastructure.
In October 2019, CDBB, the UK BIM Alliance and the BSI Group launched the UK BIM Framework. Superseding the BIM levels approach, the framework describes an overarching approach to implementing BIM in the UK, integrating the international ISO 19650 series of standards into UK processes and practice.

Structure and work

The CDBB is led by Professor Andrew Neely, building on the work of the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction, Cambridge Big Data, the Distributed Information and Automation Lab, the Cambridge Service Alliance and the Institute for Manufacturing. The CDBB is based in the CSIC's facility, the Maxwell Centre, in West Cambridge.
The Digital Built Britain strategy expanded the remit beyond BIM to include other digital processes and technologies, including new contractual frameworks, open data standards, data analytics and big data. For example, in November 2018, the CDBB published The Gemini Principles, a framework to guide the development of 'digital twin' thinking in the built environment.