Role of City Digital Twin (CDT) in Interoperability and Compatibility for Smarter Cities

City administrations face a challenge in managing the rapid and fragmented technological developments in the ongoing pursuit of smarter cities. The most recent developments in urban digital twins add to this complexity.

FREMONT, CA: The technological world of today is fragmented yet constantly expanding. Such developments have made it challenging to profit from municipal digital twins due to varied digital approaches and mindsets across city governments. Precisely, the whole discussion is about digital twins based on two digital integration procedures–systems and semantic integration. In the context of planning processes and smart urbanism revisiting the nature of underlying technologies, their insinuation for interoperability and compatibility is required.

To co-create, cross-pollinate, and support top-notch outcomes, semantic techniques open up new possibilities for bidirectional data flows that can inform both governance procedures and technology systems. Focusing on this opportunity, there is a proposal for governments where they can address the problem of fragmentation, interoperability, and compatibility by adding the technological dimension as a new goal to the triple sustainability objectives of economic, environmental, and social sustainability that serve as planning frameworks.

Policy Significance Statement

The rapid rate of siloed technological advancements, as well as their increasing complexities and hazards, have become too significant for city administrations and politicians to ignore as cities all over the world strive to become smarter. The new city digital twin advancements built on a variety of software and technologies have aggravated this. Software developments need to pay greater attention to practical realities to overcome technological lock-ins driven by business interests, rather than swaying towards these technologies for their processes, city administrations should take the lead.

Since cities are dynamic living systems that change daily, city planning has always been difficult. The development of cities in light of goals for social, environmental, and economic sustainability is often taken into account during city planning processes. These urban dynamics have changed in the 21^st century due to the introduction of faster, less expensive, and smaller electronic gadgets that are accessible to a large customer base worldwide. Large data streams may now be aggregated, processed, and analysed for more effective operations and smarter cities because of the widespread adoption of sensor technologies in the built environment and the widespread distribution of internet users. Incorporating technology into the city planning trifecta of economic, environmental, and social sustainability will raise a question on the conundrum of compatibility and interoperability for a complete urban modelling ecosystem.

Currently, politicians and city administrators are aware of the potential of technological advancements and, consequently, smart cities to handle urban sustainability challenges while boosting urban life on all scales. To end this across diverse disciplines, they have often initiated, advocated and endorsed new technological endeavours in public, private and research institutions such as Singapore’s Smart Nation initiatives. This results in an increasing variety of digital solutions, including patented optimization tools for city logistics, building management, and infrastructure design, as well as interactive online dashboards for city statistics.

To help address the interoperability and compatibility conundrum the approaches to digital twin (DT) technologies may be an important vehicle. DTs provide the chance for positive input into the physical twin and are a realistic digital depiction of assets, processes, or systems in the built or natural environment. Numerous DTs have been produced with various methodologies and objectives at various spatial and temporal scales.

Given the challenges of recreating urban complexity, the adoption of the city digital twin (CDT) for city planning and governance processes at the building, neighbourhood, system, network, city, regional, or national scale is an ecosystem of DTs that need not include all DT capabilities and characteristics. For instance, it is crucial to know where windows are located in a CDT, but it is not necessary to know all the specific window details (materials and measurements) that are available in a building DT. The ability to integrate different digital systems, formats, applications, and even other DTs is a requirement for CDTs in this regard. To represent the complete city and its numerous areas in the digital arena, this would produce enough knowledge and data for an interoperable and compatible platform.

CDTs can be categorized into two approaches, system and semantic integration. For the users to access, the former connects various technologies into one single centralised application. In order to standardise any data from knowledge fields covered by its ontologies into semantically rich data formats with context and meaning, the latter offers a common ontological framework.

In the context of urban planning and governance, technology narratives have pushed on a one-size-fits-all approach that is not appropriate. This has resulted in their considerable technical influence, which frequently determines the digital strategies and activities taken by the local administration. Meanwhile, some government agencies are fighting back against these outside forces and promoting their digital solutions for their particular operations and requirements. CDTs, when designed correctly, can bridge data silos to enable cross-disciplinary, inter-sectoral collaborative processes that can potentially promote public participation and stakeholder engagement.