Urban Digital Twins for Smart Cities and Citizens: The Case Study of Herrenberg, Germany

Batel Yossef Ravid Meirav Aharon-Gutman

11 November 2022

Complexity theory has become a conceptual framework and a source of inspiration for Smart City initiatives. In addition to many other conceptions, the Urban Digital Twin (UDT) became both a concept and a tool for generating the revolutionary act of data-driven 3D city modeling. Indeed, the UDT has increased the ability of planners to make decisions vis-à-vis data-driven city models; at the same time, however, it has attracted criticism because of its focus on the physical dimensions of cities. In facing these challenges, we seek to join the conceptual and practical efforts to generate a social turn in the field of Smart Cities and urban innovation. Creating a UDT with a social focus, we maintain, is not only a 1:1 translation of the built environment into the social realm, but also demands interdisciplinary knowledge from the fields of sociology, anthropology, planning, and ethics studies. This article makes theoretical and methodological contributions. Theoretically, it discusses the potential contribution of the Social Urban Digital Twin (SUDT) to the theory of urbanism, enabling us to represent the physical and the social environments as a single fabric. Methodologically, it enhances the know-how of the City Analytics research community by advancing a six-phase protocol for developing SUDTs, each phase of which integrates technological conceptions and social-theoretical content. The phases of the SUDT protocol are demonstrated using a specific case study: the experience of elderly residents of the Haifa neighborhood of Hadar—a low-income neighborhood in Israel characterized by ethnic and national diversity—during the Coronavirus pandemic. We conclude by discussing the contributions and limitations of the SUDT.

Philippe Michiels C. Tampère Athanasios Dalianis + 4 lainnya

1 Mei 2022

Digital twins have generated a lot of hype recently, but questions remain about what the technology actually means and how one can be built for smart cities. There is a lack of unified models and frameworks for data fusions that link the physical and virtual data exchange. This can undermine the uptake of digital twin technology by cities that are unable to tackle urban problems with advanced data-driven solutions. The T-Cell framework developed by the DUET project acts as a container for models, data, and simulations that interact dynamically in a common environment and provide useful insights for smart city decision makers. Dynamic correspondence that links the architecture with models and data makes it possible to monitor and synchronize the state and behavior of the digital twin with the physical environment being mirrored. Individual models are integrated through APIs to form a cloud of models that can be called upon to perform various what-if analyses related to traffic, air quality, or noise pollution. The framework is currently being tested with citizens in three locations in Europe, but it is easily replicable so that any city, no matter its size, vcan leverage the power of digital twins to achieve its policy goals.

R. Sumner Leonel Aguilar Jascha Grübel + 5 lainnya

15 Februari 2022

Smart Cities already surround us, and yet they are still incomprehensibly far from directly impacting everyday life. While current Smart Cities are often inaccessible, the experience of everyday citizens may be enhanced with a combination of the emerging technologies Digital Twins (DTs) and Situated Analytics. DTs represent their Physical Twin (PT) in the real world via models, simulations, (remotely) sensed data, context awareness, and interactions. However, interaction requires appropriate interfaces to address the complexity of the city. Ultimately, leveraging the potential of Smart Cities requires going beyond assembling the DT to be comprehensive and accessible. Situated Analytics allows for the anchoring of city information in its spatial context. We advance the concept of embedding the DT into the PT through Situated Analytics to form Fused Twins (FTs). This fusion allows access to data in the location that it is generated in in an embodied context that can make the data more understandable. Prototypes of FTs are rapidly emerging from different domains, but Smart Cities represent the context with the most potential for FTs in the future. This paper reviews DTs, Situated Analytics, and Smart Cities as the foundations of FTs. Regarding DTs, we define five components (physical, data, analytical, virtual, and Connection Environments) that we relate to several cognates (i.e., similar but different terms) from existing literature. Regarding Situated Analytics, we review the effects of user embodiment on cognition and cognitive load. Finally, we classify existing partial examples of FTs from the literature and address their construction from Augmented Reality, Geographic Information Systems, Building/City Information Models, and DTs and provide an overview of future directions.

C. Alexakos A. Kalogeras Georgios Kalogeras + 3 lainnya

2021

Digital twins are quickly becoming a popular tool in several domains, taking advantage of recent advancements in the Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Big Data, while being used by both the industry sector and the research community. In this paper, we review the current research landscape as regards digital twins in the field of smart cities, while also attempting to draw parallels with the application of digital twins in Industry 4.0. Although digital twins have received considerable attention in the Industrial Internet of Things domain, their utilization in smart cities has not been as popular thus far. We discuss here the open challenges in the field and argue that digital twins in smart cities should be treated differently and be considered as cyber-physical “systems of systems”, due to the vastly different system size, complexity and requirements, when compared to other recent applications of digital twins. We also argue that researchers should utilize established tools and methods of the smart city community, such as co-creation, to better handle the specificities of this domain in practice.

E. Papageorgiou S. Trang Ilja Nastjuk

28 November 2022

In the last two decades, the concept of smart cities has attracted significant research and policy attention. Despite its extensive discussion in literature, the term smart city is a fuzzy concept (Albino et al., 2015; Angelidou, 2014; Anthopoulos, 2015). It commonly refers to environments in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are utilized to offer innovative services to citizens in order to enhance their well-being and to stimulate sustainable economic growth (Yigitcanlar et al., 2018). According to Giffinger et al. (2007), the key defining characteristics of smart cities include smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment, and smart living, addressing key topics such as economic competitiveness, educational level of citizens, quality of social interactions, flexibility of labor market, governmental strategies, innovative transportation systems, sustainable resource management, or public safety. However, since the introduction of the term smart cities in the ’90 s, numerous perspectives on smart cities have emerged (e.g., Chourabi et al., 2012; Dameri & Cocchia, 2013; Hosseini et al., 2018; Yigitcanlar et al., 2018). One predominant perspective relates to the role of smart ICTs to improve the quality of citizens’ life (e.g., Bifulco et al., 2016; Dameri, 2017; Ferro et al., 2013; Gade, 2019; Van Dinh et al., 2020). Smart ICTs are wireless, embedded in objects, and record the environment using sensors (Yigitcanlar & Lee, 2014). They provide the critical infrastructure for more intelligent and interconnected solutions in areas such as healthcare, real estate, utilities, transportation, public safety, and administration (Washburn et al., 2009). In the energy grid domain, for example, smart ICTs help collect and share consumption data to optimize energy management (Farmanbar et al., 2019). In the transportation domain, smart ICTs enable safe, socially inclusive, and sustainable multi-modal transportation networks, which allow citizens to travel with ease (Herrenkind et al., 2019; Lembcke et al., 2021; Nastjuk et al., 2020; Nikitas et al., 2017; Rocha et al., 2020; Trang et al., 2015). In the building domain, smart ICTs can help to establish so-called “zero energy buildings” by significantly reducing the energy demand during the lifecycle of residential and commercial buildings (Kylili & Fokaides, 2015). In the healthcare domain, smart wearable devices can, for example, cater for remote diagnosis, medical prescriptions, and treatment of patients (Ghazal et al., 2021) or allow for the effective monitoring of public health (Trang et al., 2020). In the education domain, smart ICTs promote a more engaged learning experience in which learners can “learn at anytime, anywhere, in any way and at any pace” (Liu et al., 2017, p. 33). The importance of ICTs as a key driver for smart cities varies in the aforementioned application fields. In domains such as energy or transportation management, smart ICTs are essential enablers and require big data processing capabilities, while in domains such as education or public administration, smart ICTs have a more limited role where processing large volumes of data in real time is usually not required (Neirotti et al., 2014). Apart of the relevance of ICTs to envision smart cities, a significant body of literature has argued extensively about This article is part of the Topical Collection on Smart Cities Smart governance models for future cities.