The Hitchhiker's Guide to Fused Twins: A Review of Access to Digital Twins In Situ in Smart Cities

Fabian Dembski Michael Ruddat Claudia Yamu + 2 lainnya

16 Maret 2020

Cities are complex systems connected to economic, ecological, and demographic conditions and change. They are also characterized by diverging perceptions and interests of citizens and stakeholders. Thus, in the arena of urban planning, we are in need of approaches that are able to cope not only with urban complexity but also allow for participatory and collaborative processes to empower citizens. This to create democratic cities. Connected to the field of smart cities and citizens, we present in this paper, the prototype of an urban digital twin for the 30,000-people town of Herrenberg in Germany. Urban digital twins are sophisticated data models allowing for collaborative processes. The herein presented prototype comprises (1) a 3D model of the built environment, (2) a street network model using the theory and method of space syntax, (3) an urban mobility simulation, (4) a wind flow simulation, and (5) a number of empirical quantitative and qualitative data using volunteered geographic information (VGI). In addition, the urban digital twin was implemented in a visualization platform for virtual reality and was presented to the general public during diverse public participatory processes, as well as in the framework of the “Morgenstadt Werkstatt” (Tomorrow’s Cities Workshop). The results of a survey indicated that this method and technology could significantly aid in participatory and collaborative processes. Further understanding of how urban digital twins support urban planners, urban designers, and the general public as a collaboration and communication tool and for decision support allows us to be more intentional when creating smart cities and sustainable cities with the help of digital twins. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the presented results and further research directions.

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.

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.

S. Bibri Z. Allam

28 Juli 2022

Recent advances in computing and immersive technologies have provided Meta (formerly Facebook) with the opportunity to leapfrog or expedite its way of thinking and devising a global computing platform called the “Metaverse”. This hypothetical 3D network of virtual spaces is increasingly shaping alternatives to the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, as it represents ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. At the heart of the Metaverse is a computational understanding of human users’ cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior that reduces the experience of everyday life to logic and calculative rules and procedures. This implies that human users become more knowable and manageable and their behavior more predictable and controllable, thereby serving as passive data points feeding the AI and analytics system that they have no interchange with or influence on. This paper examines the forms, practices, and ethics of the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities, paying particular attention to: privacy, surveillance capitalism, dataveillance, geosurveillance, human health and wellness, and collective and cognitive echo-chambers. Achieving this aim will provide the answer to the main research question driving this study: What ethical implications will the Metaverse have on the experience of everyday life in post-pandemic urban society? In terms of methodology, this paper deploys a thorough review of the current status of the Metaverse, urban informatics, urban science, and data-driven smart cities literature, as well as trends, research, and developments. We argue that the Metaverse will do more harm than good to human users due to the massive misuse of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization underlying the associated global architecture of computer mediation. It follows that the Metaverse needs to be re-cast in ways that re-orientate in how users are conceived; recognize their human characteristics; and take into account the moral values and principles designed to realize the benefits of socially disruptive technologies while mitigating their pernicious effects. This paper contributes to the academic debates in the emerging field of data-driven smart urbanism by highlighting the ethical implications posed by the Metaverse as speculative fiction that illustrates the concerns raised by the pervasive and massive use of advanced technologies in data-driven smart cities. In doing so, it seeks to aid policy-makers in better understanding the pitfalls of the Metaverse and their repercussions upon the wellbeing of human users and the core values of urban society. It also stimulates prospective research and further critical perspectives on this timely topic.