Seeing the whole system

This article was first published in the 2026 Volume 6 Number 3 of the New Zealand Infrastructure Review.

New Zealand’s infrastructure challenge is often framed as a question of what we need to build next. New roads, housing, hospitals, schools, energy assets, and water infrastructure all compete for scarce public and private capital, but as funding pressures intensify, the answer cannot always be to build our way out of every challenge.

The National Infrastructure Plan suggests that many of the assets that will support New Zealand's communities and economy over the next 30 years already exist. The challenge is that these assets are ageing at a time when demand continues to grow, and the impacts of extreme weather events are becoming increasingly severe. Rather than investing strategically to optimise performance and extend asset life, infrastructure owners often find themselves responding reactively to failures, service disruptions, and emerging issues. At the same time, communities, customers, and regulators expect infrastructure to be more reliable and provide better value for money, whilst also delivering on affordability, resilience, safety, and sustainability expectations.

Infrastructure success is no longer simply about delivering new assets. It’s increasingly about making better decisions about how existing assets are maintained, renewed, or optimised. Decisions about where to invest have a direct impact on service performance, affordability, resilience, and long-term public value.

Yet making these decisions is complicated. Information is fragmented across asset registries, maintenance systems, operational platforms, engineering reports, and institutional knowledge, making it difficult to understand how assets interact across a wider network and where interventions will ultimately deliver the greatest value.

While asset management is often viewed as a technical discipline focused on maintenance and renewals, the decisions it informs have much broader consequences. Decisions about how best to maintain, replace or optimise assets directly influence service performance, affordability, resilience, and the long-term value delivered to communities.

This is where digital twins have the potential to fundamentally improve infrastructure decision-making. A digital twin is an integrated, data-driven representation of a physical asset, network, or system.

Moving from information to insight

It may represent a specific network, corridor, precinct, or city. By bringing together information about asset condition, operational performance, demand, cost and risk, digital twins create real-time, connected representations of how networks behave and how infrastructure decisions affect the network as a whole. They help decision-makers understand not just what is happening now, but how different decisions may shape future outcomes.

Traditional reports explain what has happened. Dashboards monitor components of current performance. Digital twins go further by combining real-time data and simulation and predictive modelling to provide a more complete view of how a system or network performs and support more informed decision-making. Critically, they allow infrastructure owners to test interventions and investment choices before implementing them in the physical world.

The value of a digital twin is not the model itself. It lies in helping infrastructure owners understand the likely consequences of different decisions, make trade-offs visible, and test possible outcomes before committing scarce resources.

Enabling better infrastructure decisions

The National Infrastructure Plan highlights the importance of infrastructure stewardship: understanding how assets perform and where investment can deliver the greatest long-term value.

New infrastructure often captures attention because it’s visible, tangible, and easier to understand. While new assets may be the right answer in some circumstances, they can also distract us from the full range of problems that need solving and the range of options available to address them. In many cases, the greatest opportunity to make improvements lies in making better decisions about the assets and networks we already have.

Internationally, infrastructure owners are turning to digital twins to better understand network performance, evaluate investment options, and optimise existing assets. From cities and transport networks to utilities and critical infrastructure operators, digital twins provide a more complete view of how complex systems behave and the consequences of different proposed interventions, and make more informed investment and operational decisions. Their value lies not in creating a digital model, but in improving the quality of the investment and operational decisions made using it.

By combining operational data, asset condition information and predictive modelling, digital twins help infrastructure owners understand where maintenance, operational changes, renewals, or capital investment will deliver the greatest value. Better information can reveal opportunities to optimise performance and extend asset life, but it can also validate when significant capital investment is required. The objective is not to spend less, it’s to spend more effectively.

New Zealand has momentum but lacks scale

Councils, infrastructure owners, and government agencies are already exploring digital twin use cases across water, transport, and urban environments. Research commissioned by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) identified a growing number of initiatives throughout New Zealand, particularly within local government and infrastructure planning. However, many remain fragmented, limiting their ability to operate in a genuinely connected and interoperable way.

This reflects both the progress New Zealand has made and the challenge that remains. Individual use cases continue to emerge, including Auckland’s digital twin pilot initiative for planning decisions and the digital modelling of critical transport corridors such as Nevis Bluff.

The greater opportunity lies in moving beyond individual use cases and applying digital twins across networks and systems. This can help infrastructure owners understand how whole networks perform, where investment will have the greatest impact, and where opportunities exist to improve the performance of existing assets before committing new capital.

Decisions made in one part of a network often have consequences elsewhere. By providing a more connected view of infrastructure, digital twins help decision-makers identify dependencies, understand trade-offs, and assess the likely effects of different interventions before committing resources.

Investing for better decisions

Building digital twin capability requires investment. Asset information must improve, data standards need to mature, and organisations need to adapt their ways of working to make effective use of these sophisticated decision-support tools. As digital twins become more capable, the challenge will be as much about trust, governance, and adoption as it is about technology.

Yet there is also a cost to doing nothing. Poor information leads to poorly targeted renewals, avoidable disruptions, and inefficient investment decisions.

New Zealand will continue to invest heavily in infrastructure over the coming decades. The most successful infrastructure organisations will be those that understand their assets and networks best, optimise them effectively, and invest with confidence when additional capacity is genuinely required.

Digital twins will not replace judgement, nor will they remove the need to make difficult investment choices. What they can provide is a more connected view of how infrastructure systems operate. By helping infrastructure owners see the whole system, they enable better decisions about the infrastructure assets we already have and greater confidence in the investments we choose to make next.