White paper on Open Urban Digital Twins – insights in the current state of play

Imec has written a white paper based on its multi-year research into Urban Digital Twins. It provides you with the necessary insights and gives an overview of the current state of play.

An Urban Digital Twin (also referred to as a Local Digital Twin) provides an up-to-date view of the situation in the city so that planned measures can be simulated and tested. Imec has written a white paper based on its multi-year research into Urban Digital Twins. It provides you with the necessary insights and gives an overview of the current state of play. 

Urban Digital Twins are being developed in many cities, like Helsinki, Rotterdam, Barcelona and Singapore.  A few years ago, City of Things developed a first proof of concept (PoC) of an Urban Digital Twin for the city of Antwerp. The learnings from this PoC project are now being used in the collaboration with the City of Antwerp to further explore the potential of Urban Digital Twins. Imec is also working with the city of Bruges on a digital-twin pilot project. In the European H2020 research project DUET  (Digital Urban European Twins) together with Agentschap Informatie Vlaanderen, imec is building a scalable open digital-twin framework for various European cities and regions.

The added value of Urban Digital Twins lies in allowing cross-domain decision support. A city is a complex entity in which different domains are interconnected. For a decision-support system, it is therefore essential that it can tap into the diversity of data sources and machine learning models that are available in the city’s infrastructure. The understanding and level of knowledge of Urban Digital Twins is not the same among the various parties that use and build them. To engender a common understanding on Urban Digital Twins, imec City of Things is releasing this first version of the Urban Digital Twin white paper. The paper discusses application use cases, end-user types, system architecture and design principles. It is the result of imec’s work on Urban Digital Twins since 2018 in a variety of projects, among which the DUET H2020 project and the Flanders Open City Architecture (VLOCA) project.

Lees en download de white paper hier.