As cities increasingly try to integrate smart features and applications into their operations, digital twins will become powerful enablers of designing and developing smart cities
Digital twins are now firmly established in supporting city governance. The state of Singapore is creating a digital twin of its entire country. In 2011, the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) began developing three-dimensional maps of the country.
GPS Lands Singapore, which provides content creation services for digital twins, approached the SLA with a proposal to work on a digital twin of the entire country: “The digital twin represents all of Singapore high detail 3D rendering …assist in asset management and decision-making, incl detailed management of trees and green space.”
Due to the limited size of the country, urban areas are at a high level, so many infrastructure networks and assets have been moved underground. For this reason, “SLA is currently working on the next phase of the project, a digital twin of Singapore’s national underground.” The benefits of such digital representation range from improving safety and reducing service interruptions when maintaining, repairing or constructing underground assets.
In addition, Virtual Singapore is a 3D digital replica of Singapore based on topographical as well as real-time dynamic data. This will be a prestigious platform of the country simulations and virtual tests of new urban planning solutions problems”.
The country’s National Research Foundation, the Singapore Land Authority and the Government Technology Agency are partnering in this effort. Virtual Singapore will be an important building block for the Singapore government’s work on the Smart Nation project. Smart nation is the country’s initiative to create a digital government, economy and society.
Singapore is not alone in its efforts. In 2020, researchers from the Stuttgart High Performance Computing Center, HLRS, started working with partners from the Fraunhofer Society of the University of Stuttgart (Germany) to create a digital twin of Herrenberg, Germany. Researchers want to better understand urban dynamics and interactions The goal is to improve urban planning and design.
The HLRS researchers added: “Visual representations can quickly and intuitively reveal patterns in simulation data and make it easier to understand how they are represented. phenomena that cannot be seen in the physical world.” Researchers examine tools for supporting earth and atmospheric sciences, including disaster preparedness planning.
The German city of Stuttgart has partnered with Hexagon and Fujitsu create a digital twin of the city. Jens Schumacher, Head of IT at the Stuttgart Construction Office, describes the benefits of the project: “Stuttgart’s Urban Digital Twin project provides our office with a large amount of mobility and environmental data and an IoT (Internet of Things) analysis platform. Hexagon and Fujitsu enable us use this data to make smarter decisions for the good of our city.”
Efforts to create digital twins of the urban environment
Many cities are considering digital twins to support their city management needs. Barcelona, Spain, Using the MareNostrum supercomputer urban data processing for city planning processes. The Spanish city has reached an agreement with the Italian city of Bologna to cooperate on digital twinning for the two cities, as both cities “intend to be leaders. digital urban governance“.
In Great Britain, the Digital Twin Hub companies and organizations aim to use the digital twins they are creating in the country. The program creates the building blocks that allow currently isolated twins to connect and create an ecosystem of interconnected digital twins.
The University of Cambridge is taking this action after completion Center for Digital Built Britain Partnership with the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The partnership explored how digital approaches can support and improve building and infrastructure development.
The developers created a demo for the fictional location of Sanford City. They filled the platform with data for energy, water and telecommunications networks show the effects of extreme weather.
It is not surprising that in Scandinavia, digital twins find special use. Finland aims to become a carbon neutral country by 2035 and completely recycle waste by 2050. Digital twins are considered capable of supporting decision makers by modeling the outcomes and dynamics of various policies to achieve these goals – trade-offs between approaches can be illustrated.
Gothenburg, Sweden Digital Twin City Center are working on many puzzles that will make the future digital twins of the urban environment stronger. One project, for example, looks at ways to influence the movement of people, and then understand the impact that different crowd movements have on urban environments and commercial activities.
There are projects in the US ChattanoogaTennessee; Las Vegas, Nevada; New York, New York; Orlando, Florida; and Phoenix, Arizona is working on digital twin options for a wide range of purposes.
In Australia, developers are creating digital twins for entire states. Victoria – in particular City of Melbourne – New South Walesand Queensland developing digital representations of their territories. The City of Adelaide In South Australia and Canberra Digital twins are also being worked on in the Australian Capital Territory.
Digitizing Smart Cities Opportunities
Digital twins open up commercial opportunities for developers and providers, as well as partners and users. The range of information that can be considered for visualization is virtually unlimited.
Google Company Pavement Laboratory provides solutions that support city planners and developers. Delve is a visual design tool that allows real estate teams to collaborate on projects, and Mesa is a platform for energy management in buildings.
Tree Canopy Lab is part of Google Environmental Insights Explorer a platform to help cities tackle air pollution and climate change. Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) is a tool that “helps cities and regions measure emissions sources, conduct analyses, and identify strategies to reduce emissions.”
Stanford University researchers using satellite imagery and advanced algorithms to identify areas at risk of wildfires. Researchers use surface images from European Space Agency satellites and leaf-water data from the US Forest Service. The model can then compare the images with the data to make predictions about forestland danger levels for future wildfire seasons.
In Brazil, researchers at the University of Pernambuco used a machine learning algorithm to synthesize historical maps of Recife, Brazil, into visual images that resemble modern satellite images. This approach can provide insight into land use in urban environments over time.
Features of the British Geological Survey Project Iceberg to fill in information on underground urban features and enable effective underground space management approaches “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 of New Jersey a visualization platform developed by mixed reality software provider Meemim. City officials and construction workers can use the platform in conjunction with Microsoft’s HoloLens headset to highlight pipes, conduits and other pieces of underground engineering infrastructure in an augmented reality environment.
Smart control applications are on the rise
Government organizations also consider a wide range of use cases, covering all aspects of urban life. Transport for London (TfL) is responsible for most of London, England’s transport network, including the Tube, the London Underground system. TfL works digital twin for monitoring underground rails and tunnels and collecting information on carbon emissions, heat and noise.
Seoul In South Korea and Shanghai China is developing comprehensive virtual twins for traffic and logistics management to run city services more efficiently and effectively.
ETH Zurich, Singapore-MIT Research and Technology Alliance, National University of Singapore, Technical University of Munich, etc. group of researchers climate twin development – Quantitative urban climate twin – sustainability and liveability research. It becomes a goal solving the urban heat problem in the city-state.
In China, Shanghai’s Huangpu River, ports, airports, harbors and construction sites have been integrated. a digital twin of the city’s transportation system.
There are interoperability challenges and security issues
As they evolve, the interaction between the initially muted digital twins will be a crucial aspect of building systems where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—interaction will also be an issue that needs to be litigated early on. Manufacturing, utilities, transportation, logistics, city management and many other industries are creating digital twins for their needs.
Expanding such digital twins across supply chains or infrastructure types (e.g. water, gas, communications) requires careful planning. Keeping such disparate digital twins interoperability will be a challenge, but there are other concerns.
On the one hand, sharing allows for symbiotic and holistic approaches to commercial and social challenges. On the other hand, data security and intellectual property require complex management of information access and data provision.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Martin Schwirn
Quelle/Source: Computer Weekly, 27.02.2024
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