Digital twins offer completely new options for designing, monitoring and managing cities. They allow us to optimize the performance of urban networks and all of infrastructure, especially in terms of energy, mobility, endurance, sustainability and economic growth.<\/p>\n
If digital twins<\/span> are used as a tool for planning, they are able to combine the spatial model of the city environment, the model of electric and mechanical systems and the data obtained from real time sensors.<\/p>\n Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical systems that are used to simulate. The concept of digital twins originated from the manufacturing industry. Whenever there was a problem with a device, the manufacturers tried to understand the essence of the issues and find an optimal solution, using a digital twin. Digital twins could also be used for simulation of a device performance, or one of their parts, in various environments and conditions. The information obtained was then used for setting the plans of preventive maintenance or changing the product design.<\/p>\n The concept of digital twins gradually extended to other industry fields as well and became more sophisticated. More and more often, digital twins are combined with technologies like the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, modelling and advanced analytics. Thanks to these, it\u2019s possible to develop a more accurate digital twin and perform more realistic simulations.<\/span><\/p>\n Digital twins offer a whole range of benefits for designing and managing cities. Preventive and predictive maintenance, optimization of operational effectiveness and cost savings, a higher level of communal services for citizens, and security improvements belong to the most mentioned. In recent years, we also hear more and more about utilization of these technologies in the field of ecology and sustainability.<\/p>\n However, the key applications still remain – especially simulation of movement of persons and emergency evacuations, modelling of flood risks, intelligent constructions, energy management, monitoring and prediction of air quality, simulation of road traffic and proposals for appropriate measures. Cyber security is also a very significant subject.<\/p>\n Digital twins now offer a very wide scope of application options and achieve great results. However, they require quality data and precise model constructions in order to provide quality outcomes, just like any sophisticated system. The complexity of urban environment and interconnectedness of individual structures could represent complications for creating a precise model. Lack of standards for data exchange among individual urban systems could be another complication. Acceptance and utilization of urban digital twins could also be hindered by insufficient awareness of the interested parties, as well as worries about privacy or cyber security.<\/p>\n However, despite all of these limitations, digital twins and urban modeling provide a synergic effect that enables achieving much higher process efficiency, cost savings and optimization of all aspects of living in cities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Digital twins offer completely new options for designing, monitoring and managing cities. They allow us to optimize the performance of urban networks and all of infrastructure, especially in terms of energy, mobility, endurance, sustainability and economic growth. If digital twins are used as a tool for planning, they are able to combine the spatial model […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2869,"featured_media":4330,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,6],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhere did digital twins come from?<\/h2>\n
The options of digital twins are really wide<\/h2>\n
What could complicate the situation?<\/h2>\n