Digital Twins for Cities: new digital tool for urban and geospatial analytics for agile decision making

Digital Twins (DTs) are conceived as a dynamic digital tool designed throughout its lifecycle to achieve sustainability and face the increasing challenges of cities: population growth, limited resources, and climate change, etc. They come from the willingness of the Smart Cities initiatives to introduce digital technologies, to implicate various players (governments, private parties, and citizens), and to generate insights for efficient decision-making through a range of urban analysis and simulations. Due to advances in emerging 3D technology, the availability of various data, and the evolution of simulation technologies, more and more complex physical and dynamic systems, including cities, could be handled using DTs. They integrate multi-dimensional data from different sources and implement automatic workflows to generate 3D city models. They enable two-way data flows between the physical and the virtual worlds using potentialities of IoT and sensor data. While the potential of 3D city models is well recognized in urban and geospatial communities to tackle critical issues within cities, they are starting to gain perspective on the scope of DTs. A standardized and interoperable city modeling approach is relevant if local, regional, and national governments are to move towards sustainable and resilient cities. DTs require well-structured information supported by appropriate data management, storage, and visualization tools to achieve city needs and address the Sustainable Development Goals. Given the DTs initiatives, cities worldwide are now taking the next step towards this digital solution based on open standards to enable new digital services for citizens, as they are considered in their turn as human sensors.Digital Twins (DTs) are conceived as a dynamic digital tool designed throughout its lifecycle to achieve sustainability and face the increasing challenges of cities: population growth, limited resources, and climate change, etc. They come from the willingness of the Smart Cities initiatives to introduce digital technologies, to implicate various players (governments, private parties, and citizens), and to generate insights for efficient decision-making through a range of urban analysis and simulations. Due to advances in emerging 3D technology, the availability of various data, and the evolution of simulation technologies, more and more complex physical and dynamic systems, including cities, could be handled using DTs. They integrate multi-dimensional data from different sources and implement automatic workflows to generate 3D city models. They enable two-way data flows between the physical and the virtual worlds using potentialities of IoT and sensor data. While the potential of 3D city models is well recognized in urban and geospatial communities to tackle critical issues within cities, they are starting to gain perspective on the scope of DTs. A standardized and interoperable city modeling approach is relevant if local, regional, and national governments are to move towards sustainable and resilient cities. DTs require well-structured information supported by appropriate data management, storage, and visualization tools to achieve city needs and address the Sustainable Development Goals. Given the DTs initiatives, cities worldwide are now taking the next step towards this digital solution based on open standards to enable new digital services for citizens, as they are considered in their turn as human sensors.