Digital Twin for City Planning and Citizen Engagement in Dublin
The ability to create a digital representation of a city through digital twins is a powerful tool to simulate the physical assets of the city that can be updated and changed in real time.
Digital Twins enable more resilient decisions when it comes to building or improving physical infrastructure by providing a holistic view of all the various factors affecting urban development at the city level. At the same time, digital twins also support and improve sustainability, circularity, decarbonization, and the overall quality of urban living.
These digital twins can be published online and explored by all urban development stakeholders, including citizens, to experience urban interventions, interact with them, and report their feedback from time to time.
Project Focus
Challenges
It was envisaged that smart urban development of the city of Dublin must be based on continuous engagements between technology providers, researchers, and citizens to improve the quality of life. However, there were not adequate resources or mechanisms for such an engagement, more importantly, for the different stakeholders to access and understand crucial data related to Dublin’s urbanscape.
Besides, any further innovations would require continuous evaluation of multiple infrastructure types, all of which must be studied in a real-world environment where they are interdependent, instead of discrete imaginations. With a population of 1.2 million, Ireland’s capital city of Dublin is already being developed as a smart city, meaning several layers of information must be handled simultaneously for a more comprehensive approach to data handling.
The Solution
With the help of some of the world’s leading technology providers, the Dublin City Council is creating an interactive virtual environment to ensure that citizens can provide their inputs towards urban planning and development from the safety of their homes, while development projects are on track. A digital duplicate of the entire city’s physical environment, the Dublin Digital Twin will be built on massive, cumulative, real-time, real-world data across an array of dimensions.
The physical assets of the city will be relayed through specs, drawings, documents, BIM models, and detailed analyses using advanced geo-technology. IoT feeds, sensors, drones, cameras, LiDARs, and point clouds will be deployed for the massive data collection and generation processes spanning the entire city. The Digital Twin created will offer immersive 3D and XR visualization, a 4D timeline of change, and integration with AI/ML for analytics and visibility.
Key Benefits
- An adaptable and scalable solution established for future urban planning and public engagement in the city
- Visualization of infrastructure and development in their contextual environments, being used by actual people in real-time
- Greater control over complex processes and systems across various verticals in city planning, development, operations, and maintenance
- Optimization of efficiency by predicting failures in real-time
- Services costs are set to be reduced with insights on development in the real-world
