AI and digital twins: a powerful partnership for urban management

Improving and accelerating design

AI-enabled digital twins allow users to incorporate a large amount of data easily, compare design elements and provide recommendations for alterations according to changing or conflicting design and utility requirements. For example, AI-enabled digital twins can improve designs by focusing on environmental issues such as reducing the carbon footprint or efficiency by considering operational aspects of infrastructure systems.

The combination of AI and digital twins can play a major role at the heart of the design process. Owners and operators can have difficulties communicating all aspects of the functional requirements to engineering firms, in part because many construction considerations require expertise and knowledge of available materials and approaches. Engineering firms, in turn, can struggle to highlight challenges or represent tradeoffs between design options to their clients.

Digital twins can visualise changes and issues to the entire team in intuitive ways. AI can incorporate changes and new information on the fly, and it can provide an understanding of how the infrastructure elements will fit into existing networks and how changes to these networks will affect urban dynamics over time.

Nicholas Cumins, CEO of Bentley Systems, is confident of the benefits of digital twins, noting the technology can save substantial time and effort in tasks such as design review: “There is so much data generated in infrastructure, especially during the design phase – consider all the models and iterations created, of which only one will ultimately be selected from thousands.” He also points to AI as the crucial element to take the next step in infrastructure planning and design.

Such design virtualisation can then readily find use in maintenance tasks. The combination of a variety of technologies will enable completely new approaches and strategies to infrastructure maintenance, such as mutualistic technologies. For example, drone robots can frequently capture a wide range of data via sensors from infrastructure elements that can be difficult to assess manually. AI can then identify corrosion or cracks in infrastructure, for instance, faster, more reliably and at less cost than current approaches allow for.

Other safety issues – such as those that have played major roles in fires in the state of California in past years – include tree branches and vegetation encroaching on power lines. AI can take sensor and visual data and transform them into safety-relevant information that can then feed into digital twins to create a real-time dashboard of infrastructure conditions for operators.

Supporting reporting and documentation

Such twins also enable engineers and technicians to focus on higher-value work. Infrastructure maintenance comes with substantial reporting tasks.

Cumins adds: “AI can handle documentation and annotation of drawings, freeing engineers from these routine duties and allowing them to concentrate on more critical aspects of their work.”

Pietro Borghesani, associate professor of engineering at the University of New South Wales, underscores the importance of documentation for mechanical devices: “A digital twin doesn't just simulate, it lives with the machine. You can use the digital history of your machine to control how the asset degradation is evolving and then use that knowledge to streamline your operations. Instead of being reactive to what happens to the asset, it allows us to plan with better accuracy.”

He observes how this approach can find use across asset types of infrastructure elements and beyond: “The same principles apply [across use cases]. Feed in patient-specific data, update the model continuously and simulate future outcomes. The only thing that changes is the physics. For a machine, we use dynamics and vibration analysis. For a human heart, it’s about biology and medicine.”

Not only can AI-enabled digital twins document wear, tear and behaviour of infrastructure elements over time, AI allows exploring “what if” scenarios that guide operations in the future. What if a sluice gate had been locked earlier on? What if evacuation had occurred on different routes? Such documentation can serve as sand boxes for city managers and emergency crews to learn from every event and develop best practices over time.

Digital twins thereby not only store historical data of infrastructure elements and networks but also preserve organisational knowledge. When operators and engineers leave their job, successors can make use of their experience and expertise by leveraging these digital twins.

“A well-designed digital twin acts as both a performance monitor and a training tool for the next generation of engineers,” says Borghesani.

Benefiting a wide range of applications

Digital twins also find applications across use cases in versatile ways, highlighting the commercial reach of such virtualisations. AI will not only improve existing applications but also create a plethora of additional uses that currently are too expensive or technologically difficult to pursue.

Bentley Systems is using digital twins to manage lifecycles of assets such as California’s New Bullards Bar Dam, which the Yuba River Development project operates. The damn lies in a remote, earthquake-prone area, making data collection difficult but crucial to ensure safety. Dam engineers capture image data via drones, and Bentley’s iTwin Capture processes the data. Yuba River Development also wanted to make the data accessible and find a way to process them into useful information. The digital twin provides the platform for the model of the dam that can be populated with sensor data of monitoring devices in real time.

Bentley Systems also supported Sacramento Regional County Sanitation to upgrade the Sacramento Regional Waste Treatment Plant to alleviate drought in the region. The digital twin provided situational awareness by matching changes made to the physical construction site with the digital representation to facilitate decision making. The twin supported the management of 22 related projects simultaneously.

When the Colorado Department of Transportation needed virtual support to update highway I-70, which had reached limitations of its capacity, the department turned to digital twins. The stretch of the highway in question runs through a mountainous region with waterways, requiring tight turns in parts. Bentley Systems’ software solutions were used to create a digital twin that facilitated the challenging effort.

Bentley Systems’ chief technology officer Julien Moutte highlights a particular benefit of using digital twins to find agreement across involved groups when starting substantial infrastructure projects: “The community is often a key stakeholder group. By showing realistic 3D models, stakeholders can easily visualise the designs, which reduce the overall risk of the project.”

Researchers at the University Twente’s International Institute of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation point to another use case of digital twins: the role of digital twins in mitigating urban heat islands. Urban heat islands (UHIs) represent areas in cities that are significantly hotter than their surrounding areas and regions. Not only do these UHIs lower liveability in cities, but they also gain relevance with ongoing climate change that is driving up temperatures across regions. UHIs increasingly represent public health concerns.

In addition, urbanisation of global populations is continuing unabated. Digital twins provide ways to consider various design features, layouts, materials and placements of greeneries to analyse and understand temperature signatures over the course of a day and improve air flows in street canyons, for example. The university worked with the city of Enschede in the Netherlands to mitigate such UHIs.

Reducing costs and boosting ROI

The safety contributions and commercial impact of digital twins can be substantial and financially rewarding. Analysts at McKinsey & Company’s public sector practice note digital twins’ ability to increase return on investment (ROI) for government infrastructure investments. Digital twins can provide a means of coordination for the many stakeholders involved in urban and regional infrastructure projects.

Due to the size of many of these projects and their impact on many other city networks, unintended and unanticipated side effects can affect the ROI in the long term; digital twins allow engineers to consider a wide range of scenarios and potential issues to mitigate negative effects of new projects.

Martin Schwirn is the author of “Small data, big disruptions: How to spot signals of change and manage uncertainty” (ISBN 9781632651921). He is also senior advisor for strategic foresight at Business Finland, helping startups and incumbents to find their position in tomorrow’s marketplace.