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Are you interested in the benefits and challenges of digital twins?

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Our summary today works with the article titled Creating digital twins to save our cities from 2023 by Soheil Sabri, Stephan Winter and Abbas Rajabifard, published on The University of Melbourne website. This is a great preparation to our next interviewee in episode 141, Soheil Sabri, where we talk a lot about the digital twin technologies. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see what digital twins are capable of. This article presents insights to digital twins, their benefits and current boundaries with the hope of overcoming current urban challenges.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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Digital technologies that allow experts to better predict future city environments may be a key tool in sustainable urban design. Natural disasters, like floods, earthquakes and heat waves demonstrate how little control we have over the environment. Even though we might be the reason for such disasters due to our decisions and carelessness. There is an urgent need for urban sustainability due to the frequency and severity of such disasters. Digital twin technology is taking a leading role in tackling this challenge. A digital twin is essentially a realistic and accurate virtual model – the computer model of physical processes and replicas of physical entities.

The digital twin promises to be an important tool for increased urban sustainability. Digital twins allow researchers to recreate a specific city environment and replicate the elements and processes influencing it, like traffic or emissions. Real time data can also be imported through sensors in the environment. The next step is the use of artificial intelligence to learn about these elements and processes and their effects on the environment. Digital twins with AI can possibly even predict future conditions and impacts and thus enable sustainable decision-making. Digital twins with these recent technological developments have proven financial and sustainable benefits for public and private organisations. Resource allocation can be more efficient. For example, by measuring the simulating the stormwater capacity of new road networks, water waste and loss could be reduced by integrating historical and real time sensor data and using that combined data set to create a water-sensitive urban design.

Unfortunately but naturally, there are barriers to urban digital twin application. The success of urban digital twin technology depends on timely and two-way communication between the physical and digital environments – without any compromises. There is a lack of digital literacy of decision-makers which results in less appreciation of digital technologies. Thus these receive less support and contribution in financial and research terms. So the more we can achieve technological readiness, the greater the possibility of adopting digital technologies in organisations or day-to-day activities. Moreover, data needs to be shared across silos, which must be assisted with proper standards and data sharing models.

Another issue is that decisions made by algorithms and AI may be questioned or doubted because of accountability and transparency concerns. The researchers advocated for explainable artificial intelligence, abbreviated to XAI to improve trust and transparency of AI-based decisions. XAI addresses the challenge created by the black-box concept where even AI developers cannot explicitly explain why AI arrived at a specific solution and decision. Additionally, cities are the combination of objective aspects, like green space ratio and building heights, and subjective aspects, like social construction and place experience. Systemwide simulations and practical applications are still deficient to prevent ill-informed and only objective decisions and strategies – which is needed to be researched in the future.

Digital city applications are far-reaching, and the expertise behind it needs to accommodate such dimensions. By merging IT and engineering professionals with policy makers, end-users and planning and building experts, we can better leverage the value of digital technologies, address future challenges and return the current investments to the community. In Australia, several state governments started to implement and utilise digital twin capabilities to better service the community. New South Wales spatial digital twin aggregates and visualises location information in a dynamic and multi-dimensional model of the real world. The Digital Twin Victoria platform combines a mass of 2D, 3D and live data in a single online platform.

We know that a digital twin should be more than a replica – it should be coupled with physical processes or entities in to a cyber-physical-social system. Such a system may function more like a brain than a twin – with nerves that sense, with an agency that can change the physical or the digital system and with moderation mechanisms to preserve the equilibrium of the physical and digital system. Leveraging research and development of emerging technologies with new educational programs, creates a new capability for future skill sets to integrate digital data with statistics, machine learning and data simulations. The aim is simple: to engage better with communities and communicate physical and social processes, patterns and predictions in the design of sustainable future cities.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Digital twins can be used to improve urban sustainability, resilience, and efficiency.
2. Digital twins can be used to monitor and analyse the performance of physical assets, simulate the effects of different scenarios, and improve collaboration between different stakeholders.
3. Digital twins have the potential to transform the way we manage our cities.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How do you think digital twins could be used to improve your city?
2. How can we use digital twins to predict urban futures?
3. What do you think about AI decision-making? Do you trust it or doubt it?
4. How can you use digital twins in your city? What would interest you to investigate with a digital twin?

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