Using digital twins to drive smart cities

Australia may be an old continent, but its cities are relatively new by global standards. As a result, our built environment features plenty of modern designs developed using materials like steel, concrete and glass. In a country of vast distances between urban areas, our roads, bridges, electricity transmission infrastructure and telecommunications equipment mark the landscape from city to city, from suburb to suburb — a reminder that connection is key to the community.

Keeping a country like Australia connected and thriving requires no small amount of planning, building and maintenance. While it has always been the case, the way that civil infrastructure is planned, built and maintained in Australia is changing.

As the threat of climate change looms, with extreme weather events and natural disasters becoming more frequent, government and communities are increasingly approaching the built environment with new priorities, driven in large part by sustainability and resilience.

Doing things differently from how they have been done in the past means that planners and builders are forging new ground in terms of design and construction techniques, among other elements. This shift presents challenges, but the infrastructure sector is embracing digitisation to help pave the way to effective change.

Among the variety of digital technologies that the construction and civil infrastructure industry is employing, digital twins are playing a particularly important role in fostering data-driven decisions along the entire urban and civil infrastructure lifecycle, helping to tackle the big challenges.

Digital twins and smart cities

An infrastructure digital twin is a digital representation of an infrastructure asset, facility or system that allows you to understand its current state and optimise its future performance. A digital twin provides the structure to virtualise use cases and workflows by using an up-to-date and trusted digital version of the physical infrastructure.

With digital twin technology, simulations of different scenarios can help to identify risks. However, to be scalable, an open digital twin architecture with seamless integration capabilities is required. It enables users to connect different data types and formats, as well as various systems from different suppliers.

It is in this digitisation process that a city can become a ‘smart city’. One of the hallmarks of a smart city is an understanding of how to manage and use data more effectively to support decision-making and digital services in all phases of the design and delivery lifecycle.

Smart cities are going digital by embracing technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence, machine learning and urban digital twins to make decisions based on data and create better experiences and services for businesses and citizens alike.

Smart cities tend to prioritise and invest in technology, utilising data and initiatives to improve and align city investments and operations with targets around sustainability and resilience. Such cities typically have dedicated roles like a chief digital or information officer and a digitisation unit reporting to the city leadership.

Sustainable urban infrastructure

To create resilient and sustainable urban infrastructure, those in the civil engineering and construction industry need to have a solid understanding of the urban environment and ecosystem, the ability to perform impact analysis of events and an operational awareness with defined risk mitigation procedures.

Digital twin technology supports all three of these areas, combining relevant data sources into a federated view — regardless of data types and formats — and the possibility to apply scenario simulations. Furthermore, digital twins enable engineers to link real-time sensors for situational awareness, supporting operational decisions.

Using a digital twin, it is easy to check and optimise how infrastructure deals with changed circumstances or conditions — such as social distancing, urban heat islands, traffic flows or heavy rain falls — to offer improved urban resilience.

Digital twins also consolidate all components of a building or infrastructure asset to provide an overview of the carbon footprint based on mass balances for a certain material mix and different design alternatives. Such technology provides a means to understand and benchmark the environmental impact of a project at an early stage of the development and support decarbonisation of cities.

Urban adoption

There are many early adopter cities around the world, albeit with differing starting points and focus areas. But they all have a driving need to aggregate information beyond the basic building level, covering bigger facilities or urban districts.

Against the backdrop of a proliferation of applications and systems for planning and design, asset management, and infrastructure operations, additional intelligence and insight is derived from consolidating the information all these data sources produce into a holistic view of a city, suburb or infrastructure asset, making it accessible to as many stakeholders as possible in a digital twin.

For example, our technology is currently used to support master planning and design of a new district in Berlin, called Siemensstadt Square. Over the next 15 years, more than one million square metres will be built and operated for production, housing, offices, research and education, retail, parking and accommodation.

By simulating and reflecting the current and the future state, an urban digital twin facilitates collaboration between the infrastructure asset investor, the city government, contractors and service providers, while also supporting members of the public interested in the development of the district.

Stepwise approach

The technology is here, and there is no reason to wait. New adopters can work in a phased approach based on an order of targeted use cases so that the motivation always stays high. There are many ways to create a digital twin of a city, but it typically starts with connecting, visualising, and overlaying existing data from various silos.

As a first step, users can learn how to harvest low-hanging fruit from desired use cases and scale usage internally before increasing complexity and granularity by connecting to more data sources and updating more frequently.

Every step of implementation addresses the needs of infrastructure owners, builders and managers, and creates value for the asset, or the city, in question. In a country like Australia, such technology is enabling smarter decisions, designs and developments to help build resilience in the face of change.

Image credit: iStock.com/Thinkhubstudio