In today's rapidly urbanizing world, smart cities emerged as a transformative approach to address the complex challenges of urban living.
By leveraging cutting-edge technologies and data-driven solutions, smart cities strive to enhance the quality of life for residents, optimize resource management, and improve the overall efficiency in urban systems.
Join us exploring the future of urban development and paving the way for smarter and more sustainable cities!
The driving force behind the adoption of digital twins in a smart city context is their ability to address real-world urban challenges, leading to smarter, more efficient, and more sustainable cities, ultimately enhancing the quality of life for citizens.
What if we could not only manage and plan cities in real time but also create a virtual mirror of their physical existence? Digital Twins (DTs) came to respond to the urge to bring together the physical and digital worlds, enabling data-driven city management, intelligent services and interactive systems. Therefore, digital twins are digital copies of physical objects, systems or networks, created to improve the monitoring of real-world systems, to enable what-if scenarios analysis and to provide near-real-time operational support.
Within a city, from a more operational perspective to more strategic and tactical planning, digital twins have a role to play in how cities are planned, built, and managed. By creating a digital twin of a city, the data from multiple sources such as IoT devices, and databases can be integrated into . This helps to address the existing gap in cities in terms of data correlation and interoperability, by providing a unified view of the city's data and enabling cross-functional collaboration.
Helsinki(1), Rotterdam(2) and Cascais(3) are examples of frontrunner cities to inspire and drive others to follow in the pathway towards Digital Innovation and Digital Twin adoption, by sharing lessons learned.
1 Hensinki City; 2 Rotterdam City; 3 Cascais Smart City
A digital twin is not a standalone technology, nor does it rely solely on a single technology. Instead, it might combine various technologies - Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, 3D Modeling, and Blockchain. Advancements in technology have led to new opportunities, including generative AI, which enables smart city planners to utilize data for self-training and multiple simulations, focusing on decision-making rather than hands-on implementation.
Despite the booming market and growing interest, the development of interconnected digital twin systems is still in its early stages. In the city context, it is essential to acknowledge the challenges, particularly the technical challenges related to data integration, data governance which involves the secure and ethical management of data, lack of expertise, persistence of silos in terms of systems, data sources and human resources, and investment uncertainty, especially when it comes to the maintenance and sustainability of DTs over time. Nonetheless, as the adoption of Digital Twins globally is set to continue, and there is a wealth of untapped opportunities to explore the value brought by the emerging technologies, makes them increasingly appealing to city planners. As smart cities continue to grow and evolve, the potential of Digital Twins in connecting the digital and physical worlds is only starting to be realized.