VISTA is a digital mapping tool designed to assess, visualise, and simulate cascading asset failures during emergencies. It enables real-time monitoring of infrastructure dependencies, illustrating how disruptions to key assets—such as roads, energy grids, and healthcare facilities—affect interconnected services and communities.
In addition to assessing failures, VISTA provides predictive capabilities, allowing users to simulate a range of emergency scenarios. By integrating real-world and simulated data, VISTA enables proactive planning, helping emergency responders, infrastructure managers and policy officials anticipate how disruptions propagate and optimise response efforts before incidents occur.
Current status
Deployed across development, staging, and production environments, enabling rapid iteration and refinement. Recent work has automated data ingestion pipelines so that core datasets are refreshable, improving reliability and timeliness.
Future development
Ongoing work (from August 2025) is focused on expanding data sources, developing new user-aware data access models, and building the “data room” concept to give crisis responders quick, controlled access to relevant datasets. Future versions will continue to strengthen multi-agency collaboration and scenario planning.
Emergency planning often lacks a clear, data-driven understanding of asset interdependencies, leading to delayed responses and inefficiencies. Currently, asset impact assessments are fragmented across different organisations, requiring manual collation of data under time constraints. VISTA centralises and visualises these dependencies, ensuring stakeholders can quickly assess vulnerabilities, predict cascading failures, and plan mitigations accordingly.
VISTA is testing the ability of the National Digital Twin Programme’s (NDTP) Integration Architecture (IA) to ingest a wide range of data sources, including data from sensors. It is also examining how possible scenarios are reflected in the Information Exchange Standard (IES) to allow for the output of simulations to be brought together with other data sources to support decision-making.
VISTA is a digital mapping tool designed to assess, visualise, and simulate cascading asset failures during emergencies. It enables real-time monitoring of infrastructure dependencies, illustrating how disruptions to key assets—such as roads, energy grids, and healthcare facilities—affect interconnected services and communities.
In addition to assessing failures, VISTA provides predictive capabilities, allowing users to simulate a range of emergency scenarios. By integrating real-world and simulated data, VISTA enables proactive planning, helping emergency responders, infrastructure managers and policy officials anticipate how disruptions propagate and optimise response efforts before incidents occur.
Current status
Deployed across development, staging, and production environments, enabling rapid iteration and refinement. Recent work has automated data ingestion pipelines so that core datasets are refreshable, improving reliability and timeliness.
Future development
Ongoing work (from August 2025) is focused on expanding data sources, developing new user-aware data access models, and building the “data room” concept to give crisis responders quick, controlled access to relevant datasets. Future versions will continue to strengthen multi-agency collaboration and scenario planning.
Emergency planning often lacks a clear, data-driven understanding of asset interdependencies, leading to delayed responses and inefficiencies. Currently, asset impact assessments are fragmented across different organisations, requiring manual collation of data under time constraints. VISTA centralises and visualises these dependencies, ensuring stakeholders can quickly assess vulnerabilities, predict cascading failures, and plan mitigations accordingly.
VISTA is testing the ability of the National Digital Twin Programme’s (NDTP) Integration Architecture (IA) to ingest a wide range of data sources, including data from sensors. It is also examining how possible scenarios are reflected in the Information Exchange Standard (IES) to allow for the output of simulations to be brought together with other data sources to support decision-making.
Department for Transport (DfT)*
Isle of Wight Council*
Emergency services
Utility providers
Island Roads (Highways PFI)
IoW NHS Trust & Public Health
* Key Strategic partner
VISTA is a key testbed for enhancing NDTP’s open-source infrastructure. Through this demonstrator, we are:
Following the November 2024 redevelopment of VISTA, several major improvements are now (August 2025) underway in three areas:
There are multiple ways to engage with VISTA, whether you are part of government, industry, academia, or the technical community:
If you’re interested in collaborating, adopting, or contributing, get in touch via ndtp@businessandtrade.co.uk or explore the open-source codebase on GitHub.
