City Digital Twin Potentials: A Review and Research Agenda

Abstract

The city digital twin is anticipated to accurately reflect and affect the city’s functions and processes to enhance its realization, operability, and management. Although research on the city digital twin is still in its infancy, the advancement of the digital twin technology is growing fast and providing viable contributions to augmenting smart city developments. This study reviews the literature to identify the current and prospective potentials and challenges of digital twin cities. A research agenda is also proposed to guide future research on the city digital twincity digital twin to reach the utmost level of a comprehensive and complete city digital twin. Enhancing the efficiency of data processing, promoting the inclusion of socio-economic components of the city, and developing mutual integration between the two counterparts of the digital twin are proposed to be the future research directions to achieve and utilize a completely mirrored city digital twin.

Exploring city digital twins as policy tools: A task-based approach to generating synthetic data on urban mobility

“…Deren et al (2021) argue that the four major characteristics of CDTs include accurate mapping (modeling of the physical aspects of the city), virtual-real interaction (aspects of the physical environment can be observed in a virtual environment), software definition (simulations are conducted on software platforms), and intelligent feedback (early warning of potential adverse effects and potential dangers). A systematic analysis of the CDT literature reveals that the potential for its applications can be broadly divided into five themes: data management, visualization, situational awareness, planning and prediction, and integration and collaboration (Shahat et al, 2021).…”

“…In this typology, data management becomes the crucial pillar for the development of the CDT, as the ability to manage and process data coming from different sources in the city is dependent on the ability to integrate this data through various data standardization and data sharing programs (Ruohomäki et al, 2018). The visualization of the city processes is another key feature of CDTs, where visualization of social processes is among the key challenges (Shahat et al, 2021). The situational analysis allows for the monitoring and analysis of the activities taking place in the city, which include monitoring of the health of the citizens based on the data from personal health devices (Laamarti et al, 2020), monitor daily building energy consumption (Francisco et al, 2020), or detect motion (Dou et al, 2020).…”

Digital Twins Driven Supply Chain Visibility within Logistics: A New Paradigm for Future Logistics

“…According to theory, Visibility for learning implies the extent to which new information and knowledge from both internal and external mechanisms can be obtained and absorbed by the institution. The theory notes that understanding external systems is essential for business advantage and that partners will bring new business knowledge to organizations [75]. Thus, a Digital Twins that maintains track of transport may be a potential learning opportunity to learn more about the way transport suppliers operate.…”

“…In order to build a strategic advantage, the theoretical paradigm decrees that visibility for integration reflects how adaptable the company is when it comes to implementing and incorporating new approaches and technology. Besides, establishing a typical supply chain identity is a critical step in terms of supply chain management as it allows a mentality that promotes the alignment of processes within the supply chain between actors [75]. Knowledge of critical processes must be exchanged between different actors to help with this, as knowing others' core processes can lead to developments that can strengthen the supply chain.…”

Hybrid Gis-Bim Approach for the Torino Digital-Twin: The Implementation of a Floor-Level 3d City Geodatabase

“…The contribution of geospatial data science, applied since long time to the urban scale modelling, is currently moving toward many directions on supporting decision making through data collection, data visualization, 3D modelling and effectively twinning real word (Billen et al, 2014;Ruohomaki et al, 2018). In fact, the design of advanced platforms, with the help of support public governance with computer-based replicas able to twin the real world in adaptive 3D city models is now habit calling digital twins (Shahat et al, 2021) (DUET Project, EU, 2019) They are expected in the next future to carry out not only data gathering, visualization, navigation, domain analysis (Biljecki et al, 2015;Billen et al, 2014), but also advanced big data analysis supporting correlation, updating, simulation and prediction of urban phenomena (Shahat et al, 2021). Particularly, the needs of urban design and urban morphology studies is to model the digital replicas with the joint purpose to store heterogeneous data but to effectively integrate information and promote spatial correlation of semantic data and support urban planning strategies too.…”