Virtualising urban environments and smart cities with digital twins

Efforts to create digital twins of urban environments

Many cities are considering digital twins to support their urban management needs. Barcelona in Spain is using the supercomputer MareNostrum to process urban data for the city’s planning processes. The Spanish city has an agreement with the Italian city of Bologna to collaborate on digital twins for both cities, as they both intend “to become leaders in the sphere of digital urban governance”.

In the UK, the Digital Twin Hub aims to leverage digital twins that companies and organisations are building in the nation. The programme is creating the building blocks to allow currently isolated twins to connect and form an ecosystem of interconnected digital twins.

The University of Cambridge is hosting the effort after it completed its Centre for Digital Built Britain partnership with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The partnership investigated how digital approaches could support and improve construction and infrastructure development.

The developers created the demonstration for the fictional locale Sunford City. They populated the platform with data for energy, water and telecommunications networks to illustrate the impact extreme weather might cause.

Not surprisingly, digital twins are seeing particular use in the Nordics. Finland intends to become a carbon-neutral country by 2035 and fully recycle waste by 2050. Digital twins are regarded as being able to support decision-makers by simulating outcomes and dynamics of various policies to reach these goals – trade-offs among approaches can be visualised.

In Gothenburg in Sweden, the Digital Twin City Centre is working on many puzzle pieces that will make future digital twins of urban environments more powerful. One project, for example, looks at ways the movement of people can be affected to then understand the impact crowds will have on urban environments and commercial activities.

In the US, there are projects in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Las Vegas, Nevada; New York, New York; Orlando, Florida; and Phoenix, Arizona. Each is working on its own version of a digital twin for a wide range of purposes.

In Australia, developers are creating digital twins for entire states. Victoria (including state capital Melbourne), New South Wales and Queensland are developing digital representations of their territories. Adelaide in South Australia and Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory are also working on digital twins.

Digitisation of features for smart cities

Digital twins open commercial opportunities for developers and providers, as well as partners and users. The range of information that is considered for visualisation is practically limitless.

Google’s Sidewalk Labs offers solutions that support city planners and developers. Delve is a visual design tool to enable real estate teams to collaborate on projects. Mesa is a platform for energy management in buildings.

Tree Canopy Lab is part of Google’s Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) platform, which aims to help cities address air pollution and climate change. EIE is a tool designed “to help cities and regions measure emissions sources, run analyses and identify strategies to reduce emissions”.

Researchers from Stanford University have been using satellite imagery and advanced algorithms to identify areas at risk for wildfires. The researchers use Earth-surface imagery from European Space Agency satellites and foliage-water-content data from the US Forest Service. The model then can correlate the images with the data to make predictions about risk levels of forest areas for coming wildfire seasons.

In Brazil, researchers at the University of Pernambuco used a machine learning algorithm to synthesise historic maps of Recife, Brazil, into visuals that look like modern satellite images. This approach could provide insights about land use in urban environments over time.

The British Geological Survey features Project Iceberg to fill in information about underground urban features and to enable more effective approaches to managing subterranean spaces “to help increase the viability of land for development and de-risk future investment through better management of subsurface data”.

Toms River Municipal Utilities Authority in New Jersey is using a visualisation platform developed by mixed reality software provider Meemim. City employees and construction workers can use this platform in combination with Microsoft’s HoloLens headset to highlight pipes, conduits and other parts of underground utility infrastructure in an augmented-reality environment.

Applications for smart management proliferate

Government organisations are also looking at a wide range of use cases that encompass many aspects of urban life. Transport for London (TfL) is responsible for most of the transportation network of London, England, including the Tube, London’s subway system. TfL is working on a digital twin to monitor underground rails and tunnels and to gather information on carbon emissions, heat and noise.

Seoul in South Korea and Shanghai in China are developing comprehensive virtual twins for traffic and logistics management to run urban services more effectively and efficiently.

A team of researchers from ETH Zurich, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, National University of Singapore, Technical University of Munich, and others is developing a climate twin – the Digital Urban Climate Twin – to investigate sustainability and liveability. It will aim to address urban heat issues in the city-state.

In China, Shanghai’s Huangpu River, ports, airports, ports and construction sites have been incorporated into the digital twin of the city’s transportation system.

Interoperability challenges and security concerns exist

As they evolve, interoperability between initially siloed digital twins will become a crucial aspect in creating systems where the whole is more than the sum of its parts – interoperability will also be the challenge that requires judicial considerations early on. Manufacturing, utilities, transportation, logistics, urban management and many other industries will create digital twins for their respective needs.

Expanding such digital twins across supply chains or infrastructure types – water, gas and communications, for instance – will require careful planning. Ensuring interoperability of such diverse digital twins will be an issue, but other concerns exist too.

On the one hand, sharing will enable symbiotic and holistic approaches to commercial and societal challenges. On the other hand, data security and intellectual property will require sophisticated management of access to information and provision of data.

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 adviser of strategic foresight at Business Finland, helping startups and incumbents to find their position in tomorrow’s marketplace.