Digital twin technology is quickly becoming synonymous with smart cities — an outgrowth of related areas like artificial intelligence or IoT devices.
“IoT and digital twins are a perfect match,” said Chris Medina, chief strategy officer for Clovity, an artificial intelligence and IoT software company. “They create the ability to interact virtually with all physical smart devices at all levels of the digital twin model.”
Medina was speaking on a webinar panel April 4, organized by the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance to discuss the opportunities around digital twin technology.
“You have a physical environment, and if you have data and information on what’s happening in that environment, that’s accurate, then you can create a virtual twin of it,” explained Tyler Svitak, executive director of the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance.
He described the process of creating a digital twin as “turning your physical environment into a virtual one, that you can use in real time, or in aggregate, in order to make dramatic impacts and analyses on your physical spaces.”
The development of smart devices like traffic or environmental sensing, as well as intelligent transportation management systems — all increasingly common in cities — are creating troves of data. Which is, in turn, inspiring the development of new technologies to both view and analyze urban spaces. Digital twins allow officials to create mockups of these environments given certain alterations that may be proposed.
“The ability to predict, and plan, and analyze how those physical environments will react, or how products can be designed, is basically taking over various industries,” said Medina, who noted the digital twin market is expected to grow to $73.5 billion by 2027, with an annual growth rate of 60 percent.
“Cities are quickly becoming the next [digital twin] industry,” he added. “They’re starting to surpass areas like health care and retail.”
This is due, in part, to the fact that cities do a lot of planning, and they have a lot of infrastructure.
“We have sensors everywhere,” Medina continued. “We have sensors generating data, whether we’re doing something with that data or not. We all have cloud computing, and the ability to generate that data, and store it someplace, and really reference it when we need to. But the question is, are we using it in a strategic way?”
Existing data coming from traffic management systems or smart lighting can be used to build the digital twin “and start to create models that show you how things are going to work in a physical way,” said Medina.
Farmington Hills, Mich., used digital twin technology to better understand the urban planning process, and how a new development like a hospital might affect traffic and parking in an area.
“Now you can see where the next bottlenecks are going to happen, and that’s how they’re going to use it, going forward,” said Medina. “Digital cities can help cities plan for urban expansion, and safer and more efficient cities all around.”
“Whether your problem is at a specific building, a specific intersection, or citywide, digital twins can help approach that problem,” said Svitak. “Really, the scale is just depending on the data, and how much data you have.”
