The Helsinki Twin [Finland - digital twin

Abstract

Helsinki, a world leader in using digital models as tools to achieve its ambitious and rapid decarbonisation goal by 2030, is looking to harness the potential of geothermal energy with the help of local homeowners. Two-thirds of the world's people are expected to be living in cities by 2050, so urban planning for climate change is vital, both to mitigate extreme climate events and to realise a low-carbon future. At the forefront worldwide of deploying and using a digital twin model of their city is a small team in the Finnish capital Helsinki, led by architect and city planner Jarmo Suomisto. The Helsinki digital twin is in fact two models, a Reality model, and a Semantic City GML - short for Geography Markup Language, an international standard in mapping software. Simply put, the reality model is the pretty pictures - made up of two billion polygons, and the semantic model is the underlying brains, with data layers that can be labelled, interrogated, added to, and changed. At the beginning the models were used to evaluate proposals in architectural competitions. The 1985 3D model took 12 hours to render a simple black and white street view image.