Abstract
Abstract This article describes the use of digital twins for smart cities, i. e., the Urban Digital Twin (UDTw) concept. It shows how UDTws can be realized using the open source components from the FIWARE ecosystem that are already used in more than 200 cities worldwide. The used NGSI-LD standard is supported by the European Connecting Europe Facility, the Open and Agile Smart City community, the Indian Urban Data Exchange platform, and the Japanese Smart City Reference Model. Unlike digital twins in other domains, e. g., manufacturing, where digital twins are co-developed with their physical counterparts, UDTws often evolve driven by different stakeholders, on different time scales, as well as by utilizing many different data sources from the city. This article builds on a well-established lifecycle model for Digital Twins and combines this with a conceptual model for digital twins consisting of data, reactive, predictive and forecasting (“what if”) digital twin functionalities. The article also describes how AI-based technologies can be used to extract knowledge to build the UDTws from the IoT-based infrastructure of a smart city.
Highlights
Digital twins are an essential concept that has already been developed in the manufacturing industry [1, 2, 3, 4], and is getting more attention in other applications areas as well [5]
This article describes the use of digital twins for smart cities, i. e., the Urban Digital Twin (UDTw) concept
Unlike digital twins in other domains, e. g., manufacturing, where digital twins are co-developed with their physical counterparts, UDTws often evolve driven by different stakeholders, on different time scales, as well as by utilizing many different data sources from the city
Summary
Digital twins are an essential concept that has already been developed in the manufacturing industry [1, 2, 3, 4], and is getting more attention in other applications areas as well [5]. As in many other areas, the digital transformation of smart cities needs to break down the barriers of disconnected information silos. One reason for the lack of sharing is the low-level representation and tight coupling of applications and system components making any reuse difficult. To break these silos and enable sharing knowledge and gaining relevant insights, suitable concepts, representations, and interfaces are needed. This is especially true for cities with their scale, heterogeneous structures, and a multitude of stakeholders involved. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) and the related Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) build the technology foundation on top of which the UDTws will be built
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