The European Space Agency (ESA) has published details about the UK’s National PNT Digital Twin Environment (UPDATE) project, which it is providing funding for. The system is being developed to model how disruption to positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) propagates through interconnected critical systems and to test mitigation before an incident occurs.
There is broad reliance on PNT across critical infrastructure: electricity grids, telecommunications, financial transactions, transport, defence, and emergency services all depend on accurate positioning or timing. ESA cites UK analysis estimating that a 24-hour PNT outage could cost £1.42 billion and a week-long outage up to £7.64 [CHANGE: Inserted missing word “billion.” to complete the sentence and maintain financial scale]. At the same time as dependency is increasing, threat activity is rising, with spoofing and jamming incidents becoming more frequent.
When those services are disrupted, the impact is immediate and widespread, affecting operations, safety, and economic activity.
The challenge is not simply technical performance, but understanding where vulnerability exists, how disruption propagates across interconnected systems, and what actions can be taken to maintain continuity.
The UPDATE project addresses this by providing a digital twin capability that allows government and stakeholders to model dependencies, assess risk, and test resilience strategies before disruption occurs. Rather than reacting to incidents, it enables informed decisions on how to prioritise mitigation measures, strengthen system resilience, and support national policy on PNT assurance.
Through its Navigation Innovation Support Programme (NAVISP) Element 3, ESA is supporting the UPDATE project as part of a broader effort to help European states move from awareness of PNT risk to practical, deployable resilience measures aligned with national policy frameworks.
The UPDATE project’s digital twin will provide virtual representations of various systems and services that could form the future British PNT system-of-systems, aggregating data from satellite systems such as GNSS and complementary systems such as eLoran, which offers navigation capabilities based on terrestrial towers, and the UK’s National Timing Centre, which provides accurate, resilient, and secure timing, traceable to the global time scale, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
“Assessment of resilience is the primary goal of the digital twin. The system will allow government planners to better understand the immediate risks associated with the country’s reliance on PNT services. It will allow them to assess the consequences of service disruptions and explore mitigation strategies to improve national resilience,” says Rafael Lucas Rodriguez, ESA’s Head of NAVISP.
“The project’s results will directly support the UK’s Policy Framework for Greater PNT Resilience, which outlines the UK’s current and future priorities to strengthen PNT resilience across the critical national infrastructure and the wider economy, and to foster sustainable growth,” says Harshbir Sangha, Deputy Director for Satcoms and PNT at the UK Space Agency.
Resilience Forward comment
This is a strong example of why a taking a systems approach to resilience is vital. While conventional business impact analysis may identify that several services depend on GPS/GNSS, it won’t reveal how failure cascades between telecoms, power, transport, and financial infrastructure. Extending dependency mapping to this level of system-of-systems resilience analysis will enable a much wider depth of impact understanding.
