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ICT
Industry, Innovation And Infrastructure
Sustainable Cities And Communities
Climate Action
Digital Twins are used increasingly to support urban planning processes – by visualizing urban data, show-casing future scenarios and many other use cases. In general Digital twins are virtual representations of an object, process or system that can be used to run simulations to optimise efficiency and examine what-if scenarios. The technology has been primarily used for manufacturing to test products (e.g. as of 2018, GE had 1.2 million digital twins for 300,000 types of assets) but is quickly expanding to buildings, supply chains and entire cities as digital planning technology advances (Castro, 2019). Integrating data from the Internet of Things (IoT) with the advanced modelling capabilities of technologies such as geospatial information systems (GIS), virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and building information modelling (BIM) allows governments and industry to create predictions of how systems will react and respond to real-world data. Creating a feedback loop between the virtual and real worlds results in substantial improvements of processes and impacts, with time-saving and financial benefits.
The concept of digital twins is not new; for example, NASA has been running simulations of spacecraft for decades, but the rapid growth of connected sensors and endpoints with the rise of the IoT and advancements in artificial intelligence has opened up a myriad of possibilities for the planning and analysis tool. Potential uses for digital twins are still being imagined. Uses for cities currently include using digital twins to plan transportation systems, prepare for natural disasters and identify optimal locations to install solar panels. Future uses could include predicting how a disease will spread and informing optimal lockdowns and hospital reservations or using the tool to facilitate collaborations with other cities that have shared problems and mutual goals.
Problems to be solved:
| Ease complex decision-making | Enable more efficient urban planning | Enable more efficient project implementation and monitoring | Create better preparedness for emergency situations | Make urban data easier to understand |
The main goal of Digital Twins is to ease urban planning processes, use data and increase transparency. Besides that, the solution achieves the benefits listed below. Whereas some benefits are likely to be fulfiled with a basic implementation of the solution, the fulfilment of the potential benefits depends on the functions implemented in a specific project.
Enhanced data analysis
Facilitating citizen engagement
Improving personnel efficiency
Improving life quality
Enhanced data collection
Increased data transparency
Enhanced data collection
Efficient integration of renewables
accessing data (e.g. from sensors) about the different components of a city
use real time data to create simulations that can predict how a product or process will perform
provide decision makers with information on how to optimise simulated products or processes
Simulate disaster response to best prepare
features enabling citizen participation and stakeholder collaboration
This virtual twin focuses on all energy demands (electricity, district heating) and on-site electricity production from PV.
Combining geographical and building information with energy simulation, allows for quantifying energy related as well as potentially other indicators for city districts.
Integration of Espoo’s 3D City model in the planning process of positive energy districts (PEDs)
Digital twins cover a broad range of applications and well-established categories may not encapsulate all aspects of each adoption of the technology. The following categories were identified by the High Value Manufacturing Catapult Visualisation and VR Forum (2018).
The simplest form of digital twin, this variant displays the live state of a physical asset or process to human observers. The value provided is the ability for a city to have people act on the information provided. For example, a city could have a digital twin that tracks the condition of streets and roads, letting observers know when the conditions require maintenance to be done.
Interactive digital twins take control of at least one aspect of the physical asset or process to achieve better performance, either from internal monitoring or more complex analysis. For example, thermostats in public housing units report when the temperature has gone above or below a certain threshold, triggering automatic responses to adjust the amount of heat being produced by the heating system.
This is the most complex type of digital twin. Predictive digital twins monitor state information over time to provide augmented information such as recommendations and/or warnings to human observers and/or other digital systems. For example, to expand the street monitoring system example from the Supervisory Variant, the system could predict when streets will require maintenance based on the amount of traffic the streets encounter. The difference here is that in the Supervisory example, the city needs to rely on their own interpretation of the street conditions whereas in the Predictive case, the city is directly informed when the conditions will require maintenance based on information that was not available in the Supervisory case. This reduces the amount of human judgment required.
Digital twins are supported by cities with:
Digital Twins of smart cities is a new application of several technologies that need to be interoperable and high-performance. A capable and innovative team, with in-depth knowledge of how these technologies and their data function, will support a city in getting the most out of their digital twin. A brief overview of some of these technologies that are integrated into digital twins follows:
Stakeholder Map of an Urban Digital Twin (BABLE, 2021)
Across all industries, the global digital twin market size was valued at USD 3.1 billion in 2020 with an expected CAGR of 58% until 2026, when it is projected to reach USD 48.2 billion. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to be a major driver of the digital twin market growth, in particular in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, as well as for cities to better monitor outbreaks and respond to the changes in daily life brought by the pandemic (Markets&Markets, 2020).
Digital Twins on the city level are still a nascent technology and the cost structures will vary widely based on how advanced the software and hardware the city decides to invest in. One example, Virtual Singapore, had a budget of $73 million for developing their digital twin platform and for researching the tools and technologies required (NRF, 2020).
ICT
Building
The aim was to visualise a future school extension in the most immersive and photorealistic way to share it with the local community.
Mobility
In the coming years, the city of Essen will rely on artificial intelligence (AI) for the damage assessment of roads. Named TWIN4ROAD, the Office for Geoinformation, Surveying and Cadastre together with Point Cloud Technology, HPI Potsdam and Straßen.NRW launched a three-year research project.
Energy
Air
Building
TPC identified areas of improvement for the management of the HVAC systems of two buildings. We performed a building energy performance analysis using artificial intelligence techniques to make an accurate prediction of the energy needs of these buildings to reduce their energy inefficiencies.
Energy
ICT
Water
Building
Other
BIMROCKET is an open source platform for managing Building Information Modeling (BIM) projects, a collaborative working methodology for the construction industry. It allows viewing and editing building models and storing BIM projects in an OrientDB database.
Social Responsibility
Building
ICT
Fällanden did a municipality development project and wanted to offer their population a realistic, interactive visualisation with which the context of the newly planned buildings could be clearly shown. With the resulting clarity, a more participatory and faster decision-making process was achieved.
Mobility
Building
Providing a co-creation workspace for a wide range of stakeholders for a large city development project, to analyse the impact of the development through simulation and analysis.
Energy
ICT
Building
The basic idea of the Digital twin of Sello building block is that it looks and behaves the same as real, but it is only a digital copy from energy point of view. The use case can be used for energy optimising or Virtual Power Plant (VPP) use cases.
An intelligent and connected public space collects data in public areas and displays or reacts on the data. The data can be securely transferred via Wi-Fi or other similar technologies to be, i.e. combined with a central system.
According to the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in the EU.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a constantly and rapidly evolving technological advancement that aims to increase the connectivity of our daily activities. IoT enables more effective and informed decision-making through improved data analysis and increased interconnectedness.
In the past 70 years, AI has been a rapidly growing field and is being applied nowadays in a wide range of applications.
Urban resilience is the ability of an urban system and all its constituents across temporal and spatial scales to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance.