‘2120022, 4.07 PM From Concept to Practice: Digital Twins to Clty Twins | Data-Smart City Solutions From Concept to Practice: Digital Twins to (oi eV BY Teks BY JUNCHENG (TONY) YANG © SEPTEMBER 29, 2022 Can urban planners and policy-makers test plans and policies in a virtual sandbox? ThE term digital twin refers to an intricate digital replica of the built environment. The di; twin concept gained significant popularity in urhan-related fields due to its attractive potential in improving urban planning, governance, policy-making, and public engage However, whether this concept will fulfill its promises remains a critical question. This article aims to present the origin of digital twin and its derivative concept: city digital twin, and to critically discuss how we should understand and utilize this influential concept. ORIGIN OF THE “DIGITAL TWIN” Digital twin is a young concept. Michael Grieves, along with his colleague John Vickers of NASA, coined the concept in a product management course at the University of Michigan htps:/datasmarash harvard edulconcept-pracice-digitalwins-cly-wins 9‘12022, £07 PM From Concept to Pract: Digital Twins to Cy Twins | DateSrart Cy Slutons in 2003 (Grieves, 2014). At the time, the term was a quick conceptual understanding of a virtual replication of a physical product, with a focus on representing an actual object using digital tools. In the next two decades, the rise of computation and sensing technologies in manufacturing and complex system design brought new opportunities to the digital twin concept. Researchers from aerospace engineering revisited and formally defined the term in journal articles throughout the early 2010s (Tuegel et al., 2011, Shafto et al., 2012; Glaessgen and Stargel, 2012). Even if these research articles remained in a specific industry, they were the first to demonstrate digital twin applications and their effects in engineering and manufacturing, as opposed to a conceptual understanding of the virtual and the physical. From there, the research on the digital twin began to draw increasing attention from academia and manufacturing and engineering industries (Tao et al., 2020). A significant consequence of the increased popularity of digital twins is the diversification of applications tailored to different fields. There is growing literature focusing on nuanced aspects of digital twin, such as physical-physical interaction, virtual-virtual interaction, twinning/modeling techniques, data synchronization, and so forth (Jones et al., 2020). However, the most common denominators of digital twins followed Grieves’ original descriptions. There are three components - the physical entities, the full-scale virtual counterparts, and the connections between the two components for data exchange. Every piece of information generated by either the physical or the virtual is captured and processed in the integrated digital twin system. That being said, modeling and data fusion are the basis of implementing a digital twin solution in practice. According to Tao et al. (2020), modeling is a rather broad term that refers to not only the modeling of the virtual entity from the physical entity, and vice versa, but also the modeling of data exchange, simulation, and future applications. Data fusion refers to data preprocessing, mining, and optimization. Every part of a digital twin system generates data. The capacity to integrate different types and volumes of data is the basis for digital twins to realize its potentials beyond just 3D representation, such as enabling validation, simulation, or production optimization. For that, not only was digital twin an influential concept in manufacturing industries but also consumer product design. While digital twin is an optimization tool to streamline factory production, digital twin is also attractive equipment for expensive and complex industrial products, such as brand- new electric vehicles, high-end robot cleaners, or personal devices. THE CITY DIGITAL TWIN City digital twin is one of the extended versions of digital twin. Considering the wide adoption by other disciplines, the rising popularity of the city digital twin is not a htps:idatasmarash harvard edulconcept-practice-digital-vins-cly-wins 219‘12022, £07 PM From Concept to Pract: Digital Twins to Cy Twins | DateSrart Cy Slutons coincidence. Two main concepts have inspired interest in developing the city digital twin. The first is the growing accessibility to spatial informational tools such as the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS), while the second is the advancement of the Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries. GPS and GIS tools can scale and represent individual buildings, vehicles, or pedestrians. Additional layers of information, such as energy consumption, footprint and floor heights, vehicle geographic location, and traffic flow, can also be integrated to complete a full digital representation of the built environment. GPS and GIS tools digitally represent urban environments but with different focuses. In general, GPS-based navigation applications (such as Google Map and Waze) or transport-sharing applications (such as Uber, Lyft, and Bluebikes) work with real-time mobility data in cities, whereas GIS applications focus on managing and visualizing organized datasets within specific time frames, such as population demographics, economic statistics, building footprints, or ecological conditions. BIM applications enable micro-monitoring and management of buildings or infrastructure assets. Beyond just a 3D representation of the physical entity, BIM is a system that integrates extensive information related to a building or a physical infrastructure entity, for instance, documentation of building infrastructure (such as the HVAC system), current building conditions (such as room temperature, utility usage, and building code access), and building safety and security. That is partially why AEC companies frequently rely on BIM to design and manage complex construction processes. For either property or construction management, a BIM replica is a convincing example of digital twin, because not only do most BIM applications readily represent the physical object through 3D modeling, but they provide additional functions such as monitoring operations, visualizing usage, and documenting data. The successes of developing functional BIM management systems in AEC industries and property management led researchers and practitioners to speculate about the possibility of scaling up the practice from buildings to cities. Even if it might take a long time to accomplish a massive city-scale information model, one may consider each building-scale BIM as an individual component of a city-scale digital twin (Lu et al., 2020). Theoretically, a city digital twin is a hierarchical system architecture comprising many sub-level digital twins. In this context, every building with a BIM-based replica is one of the “building-digital twin” components. Since 2017, the number of conference proceedings and journal articles on city digital twins has multiplied rapidly. The published works focus on different cities, but many of the publications have highlighted overlapping potentials in the applications. Scholars were able to categorize some key themes as potential uses of city digital twin (Shahat et al., htps:idatasmarash harvard edulconcept-practice-digital-vins-cly-wins 39‘2720722, 407 PM From Concept to Practice: Dil Twins to Cy Twins | Data-Smant Cty Slutons 2020; see also Dembski et al., 2019; Ham and Kim, 2020; Deng et al., 2021), including but not limited to, data management (such as data processing, interoperability, and software fusion), visual representation (such as navigation, 3D real-time experience, and personalized information systems), situational awareness (such as monitoring, tracking, and localization), and urban planning (such as policy evaluation, scenario planning, and public engagement). In practice, well-known early attempts at building city digital twins emerged in Zurich and Singapore. Both twinning projects began by creating a high-resolution 3D representation of the built environment and aimed to pair additional layers of information with the 3D model. In Zurich, the GIS City of Zurich (GIS Stadt Ziirich) managed the project and implemented it with 25 service departments of the city of Zurich. The high-resolution 3D model consists of 1) a terrain model, 2) an urban block model, and 3) a roof model. The data of the three models come from LiDAR images, the city cadastral survey, and semiautomatic photogrammetry, respectively. On top of the high-resolution model, other layers of open government data visualization may improve the model's functionality, such as street spaces, public utilities, and selected public buildings and facilities. Schrotter and Hurzeler (2019) presented how the city’s digital twin may enhance city administration and support urban planning decision-making. Several noticeable use cases include climate monitoring through building temperature analysis, showcasing architectural competition through augmented reality (AR), and visualizing new developments for public engagement. Virtual Singapore, funded by Singapore's National Research Foundation and managed by the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and the Singapore Land Authority (SLA), is another leading practice of building a city digital twin. Similar to Zurich's experiment, Virtual Singapore began with a complete, high-resolution 3D modeling of the built environment. The Virtual Singapore team has an ambitious agenda of integrating various 3D features, such as trees, green spaces, street infrastructure objects, and so forth. The Singapore Land Authority was also able to add the city’s BIM data submitted by developers and the city's geospatial data (BCA, 2011). Both projects are early attempts at constructing city digital twins. They presented convincing methods of structuring one-way information flow from the physical to the virtual. The 3D digital representation of a dense, complex city may yield impressive potential in assisting public engagement, scenario planning, shading analysis, and policy- related research work. The two projects emphasized digital representation more than modeling and simulation, most likely because the latter required much more technical support in data integration, modeling, and simulation. THE NEXT STEPS OF CITY DIGITAL TWINNING htps:idatasmarash harvard edulconcept-practice-digital-vins-cly-wins 49‘2720722, 407 PM From Concept to Practice: Dil Twins to Cy Twins | Data-Smant Cty Slutons The research and practice related to city digital twins are still in their infancy, and there is no consensus on what a realized city digital twin should be. In general, researchers and practitioners emphasize the capacity to digitally represent the physical urban environment. However, they might hold divergent opinions on other components, such as modeling urban processes or predicting socio-economic impacts. Early discussions and speculations of city digital twin almost unanimously implied a fantasy about city digital twin as the ultimate tool to model and simulate urban processes. While some scholars consider urban modeling and prediction as the critical components of a city digital twin system (Schrotter and Hurzeler, 2019; Nochta et al., 2021), some argue that it is nearly impossible to mirror the full details of a city’s physical environment, socio- economic processes, energy consumption, and human behaviors, hence leaving no chance for reliable urban modeling and simulation (Batty, 2018). Batty (2018) made an insightful discussion on the assumed potentials of a city digital twin and its capacities to model the contemporary urban environment. On the one hand, modeling is a process that inevitably involves abstraction and simplification. That raises immediate questions about whether a digital model may fully represent today’s complex urban environment. On the other hand, if the model is a convincing duplication of an urban environment, the model itself may just run in parallel with the original urban environment, leading to a disconnection between the digital model and the physical entity because the model does not need to take inputs from the physical world. In other words, both situations present logical challenges for practitioners and researchers working on conceptualizing modeling and simulation. The former point suggests that the fundamental characteristics of modeling might prevent itself from making accurate simulations of the dynamic urban environment. The latter, by recognizing the dynamic urban context as a “black box,” implies that a perfect digital replication may simulate on its own and yield results that are possibly irrelevant to the real world. Indeed, cities’ overwhelming complexity places a fundamental challenge for city-level digital twinning. Modeling and simulation do not face such a dilemma when being applied in a product-level digital twin system. To respond to the challenge, there are two notable perspectives addressing how city digital twins may progress toward the next phase. The first perspective highlights the city digital twin’s capability of conducting city-scale simulation. However, to ensure the feasibility of a city-level modeling, this perspective avoids imagining a full-scale city digital twin. Instead, it highlights the possibility of disintegrating the city digital twin into multiple sub-level digital twins tailored to specific city service (Ivanov, 2020; Lu et al., 2021; Esri, 2021). In that sense, a city digital twin does not perform as a holistic system, but as a cluster of multiple levels of digital twins that has specific focuses, such as “building digital twin,’ “road digital twin,’ “greenery htps:idatasmarash harvard edulconcept-practice-digital-vins-cly-wins 59‘2720722, 407 PM From Concept to Practice: Dil Twins to Cy Twins | Data-Smant Cty Slutons digital twin,’ “mobility digital twin,’ and so forth. The underlying hypothesis is that each sub-level digital twin may perform comparably to a digital twin system applied in traditional manufacturing processes, where the limited scope may increase the possibility to build a controlled environment for modeling and simulation. The second perspective asks researchers and practitioners to shift attention from investing in designing interfaces and developing applications that may fulfill the promises on representation, modeling, or simulation. Instead, it aims to redirect the focus toward structuring solid hardware and software infrastructure as the foundation of digital twinning (Tomko & Winter, 2019; Wan et al., 2019). Rather than emphasizing the 3D representation of the built environment or potential applications, this perspective prioritizes improving sensing devices in cities and public cloud servers that synthesize data from different sources - population demographics, mobility activities, energy consumption, land use and development and so forth. In essence, it is a preemptive strategy that prepares a comprehensive urban dataset that may accommodate future demands for novel analytics and application development that respond to specific issues. It is unfair to conclude that either of the two alternative perspectives may provide direct answers to the dilemma of modeling a complex urban environment. However, the two perspectives bring forward a subtext that city-level digital twinning is essentially a long- term upgrading process (Wan et al., 2019). It demands step-by-step modeling to gradually join socio-economic processes, human behaviors, mobility, energy use, and the built environment with an intelligent digital representation. The difficulty of city-scale twinning does not preclude experiments of sub-level modeling or attempts to structure an infrastructure layer using diverse urban data. While carrying forward these visions and thoughts, we must also advocate more attention to the business modeling and policy support behind city digital twin practices. Adoption of novel technologies in relatively traditional industries usually depends heavily on government incentives that encourage R&D as well as solid market demand (Ullah et al., 2021). While the city digital twin might have demonstrated impacts on urban planning, sustainable development, mobility planning, or public safety, it has progressed very little in work related to real estate development, economic development, or industrial production. To overcome the challenges requires substantive studies that advance the city digital twin as a concept and a field as well as policies that promote marketisation and cross-disciplinary R&D. BIBLIOGRAPHY htps:idatasmarash harvard edulconcept-practice-digital-vins-cly-wins cry‘12022, £07 PM From Concept to Pract: Digital Twins to Cy Twins | DateSrart Cy Slutons Batty, M. (2018). Digital twins. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 45(5), 817-820. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808318796416 Building and Construction Authority (BCA). (2011). Build Smart: The BIM Issue [Government Report]. 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Developing a Digital Twin at Building and City Levels: A Case Study of West Cambridge Campus. Journal of Management in Engineering - ASCE, 36(3), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)ME.1943-5479.0000763 Nochta, T., Wan, L., Schooling, J. M., & Parlikad, A. K. (2021). A Socio-Technical Perspective on Urban Analytics: The Case of City-Scale Digital Twins. Journal of Urban Technology, 28(1-2), 263-287. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2020.1798177 Schrotter, G., & Hiirzeler, C. (2020). The Digital Twin of the City of Zurich for Urban Planning. PFG - Journal of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Science, 88(1), 99-112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41064-020-00092-2 htps:idatasmarash harvard edulconcept-practice-digital-vins-cly-wins 119‘12022, £07 PM From Concept to Pract: Digital Twins to Cy Twins | DateSrart Cy Slutons Shahat, E., Hyun, C. T., & Yeom, C. (2021). City Digital Twin Potentials: A Review and Research Agenda. Sustainability, 13(6), 3386. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13063386 Tao, F, Zhang, H., Liu, A., & Nee, A. Y. C. (2019). Digital Twin in Industry: State-of-the-Art. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 15(4), 2405-2415. https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2018.2873186 Tomko, M., & Winter, S. (2019). Beyond digital twins - A commentary. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 46(2), 395-399. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808318816992 Tuegel, E. J., Ingraffea, A. R., Eason, T. G., & Spotswood, S. M. (2011). Reengineering Aircraft Structural Life Prediction Using a Digital Twin. International Journal of Aerospace Engineering, 2011, €154798. https://doi.org/10.1155/2011/154798 Ullah, F., Sepasgozar, S. M. E., Thaheem, M. J., & Al-Turjman, F. (2021). Barriers to the digitalisation and innovation of Australian Smart Real Estate: A managerial perspective on the technology non-adoption. Environmental Technology & Innovation, 22, 101527. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eti.2021.101527 Wan, L., Nochta, T., & Schooling, J. M. (2019). Developing a City-Level Digital Twin? Propositions and a Case Study. In International Conference on Smart Infrastructure and Construction 2019 (ICSIC) (pp. 187-194). ICE Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1680/icsic.64669.187 TOPICS INFRASTRUCTURE DATA VISUALIZATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR JUNCHENG (TONY) YANG Juncheng (Tony) Yang is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and research assistant for Data-Smart City Solutions. His research focuses on the institutional arrangements in the tech-enabled “smart cities” context, where emerging information technologies are reshaping citizen engagement, governance, and urban planning and design. Previously he was a researcher at the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab and the MIT Future htps:idatasmarash harvard edulconcept-practice-digital-vins-cly-wins a9‘2120022, 4.07 PM From Concept to Practice: Digital Twins to Clty Twins | Data-Smart City Solutions Urban Collectives Lab. Juncheng obtained a Master of Science in Urbanism from MIT, a MSc. in Urban Planning from the London School of Economics (LSE), where he received the Royal Geographical Society IBG research fund, and B.Arch, magna cum laude and with distinction from Rice University. ALSO ON DATA-SMART SOLUTION GIS Enables Collaborative Ne cS ice Mos) EL lS Deu ele we ail (ergy ie RA Te De artsy htps:idatasmarash harvard edulconcept-practice-digital-vins-cly-wins 319