In today's world, more than half of the population lives in urban areas, and with the rapid growth of urbanization rate, cities are facing great challenges in meeting the housing, infrastructure, transportation, and energy needs of urban populations, and new ideas and methods are urgently needed. The purpose of urban transformation and sustainable development is to achieve the common prosperity of man and nature for generations. This requires shifting the focus of urban development from creating a built environment to improving the outcomes of urban construction– cities must benefit people and local development. To achieve this, urban systems must be synergistic because cities are complex systems of interconnected assets and networks. The city is a "systematic system", a typical representative of a complex giant system.
At present, digital twin cities have been implemented in Singapore, Xiong'an, China and other places, effectively improving the level of urban public services and management, helping to provide urban services more conveniently and efficiently, and promoting more three-dimensional and refined urban governance. However, the digital twin city is still in the exploration period, facing many challenges such as different understandings, immature technology, and unclear business models, and it is urgent for all parties in industry, academia, research and application to fully explore, gradually reach consensus on the connotation and architecture of digital twin cities, share best practice experience, and help the orderly development of digital twin cities.
In this issue of Intelligent Internal Reference, we recommend the World Economic Forum's report "Digital Twin Cities: Framework and Global Practice", which puts forward 4 major technical characteristics and 3 development visions of digital twin cities, deeply analyzes the 9 key elements driving the development of digital twin cities, and puts forward ideas and suggestions for building high-quality digital twin cities in view of current challenges.
Source World Economic Forum
Original title:
Digital Twin Cities: Frameworks and Global Practices
Author: Not specified
First, four major technical characteristics, digital twin technology brings great value to the city
Digital twin cities basically have four typical technical characteristics, namely the accurate mapping of physical cities and digital cities, the in-depth insight of digital cities, the virtual and real interaction between digital cities and physical cities, and the intelligent intervention of digital cities in physical cities.
▲Technical characteristics based on the operation mechanism of digital twin cities
Through the accurate mapping of physical cities and digital cities, through the use of Internet of Things technology (loT), geographic information system technology (GIS), intelligent building model technology (BIM), etc., digital twin cities can present the whole picture of physical city operation at different levels and scales, including urban buildings, traffic roads, vegetation, water systems, urban components, pipelines and other static geographical entities, as well as various subjects of dynamic urban dynamic changes such as people, vehicles, terminals, and various organizations.
Analysis and insight of digital city: In the digital space, based on the aggregation and integration of data collected by physical cities, it is possible to analyze urban congestion, building energy consumption, whether the planning is reasonable, whether underground pipelines need to be repaired, etc., insight into urban operation risks, and present the real scene effect in a digital simulation way, users can modify the timing of signal lights, control high-power consumption facilities, change planning sites, etc., and formulate strategic measures to improve the operation status of the city.
Virtual and real integration of digital city and physical city: Physical city can be enriched, extended and expanded in digital space, for example, city managers can interact with physical city based on the interface of digital platform, search entities and frame statistics to adjust the location, height and shape of buildings, and create a more comfortable and cooler environment for residents. In addition, the platform can also superimpose noise maps, energy consumption heat maps, etc. at any time, analyze and simulate calculations, and specify measures to improve the environment.
Word city to physical city intelligent intervention: in the digital space, the digital twin city platform can present the state of urban operation in real time, once the physical city has accidents, disasters and other alarms, city managers can quickly deploy corresponding countermeasures, in addition, can also through deep learning, simulation to predict the city may occur in the problem or risk, to prevent, in order to reduce property loss, to ensure people's safety.
Digital twins can help promote urban cost reduction and efficiency, and improve urban vitality. One is to improve business profitability, where digital twin technology allows both "if" and "best" scenarios to be run simultaneously to identify available strategies that can maximize profits. The second is to optimize the allocation of resources, intelligent analysis of key links such as factor allocation, processing, circulation, etc., and make resources more efficient and rational use through policy regulation, it is predicted that by 2024, more than 25% of new loT business applications will be bound to adopt digital twin functions; the third is to reduce the cost of urban innovation, and the digital twin city model can be used as a cloud service for enterprises and citizens to improve the vitality of urban innovation.
Digital twins can help significantly improve the lives of residents and make cities more inclusive. The first is to enhance the happiness of citizens' lives, through the integration of virtual and real, the integration of scenarios of the digital twin hospital, digital twin classroom, digital twin nursing home, etc., can be the service of the individual throughout the whole, full-time, panoramic personalized tracking service, optimize the service experience. The second is to ensure personal safety and improve the safety and reliability of urban operation, and the digital twin city can simulate the performance of assets and equipment, which can be used to predict failures and avoid risks, which is conducive to ensuring the safety of residents' lives. Third, the digital twin city platform provides visual and three-dimensional services for the elderly, children and other social public of all ages, significantly reducing the threshold of digital twin services and realizing the public sharing digital dividends.
Digital twins help to continuously optimize the ecological environment and improve the resilience of cities. According to a survey, a virtual power plant project in Germany can reduce CO2 emissions by 630 tons per year for the park and reduce the total cost of energy consumption in the park by 4.2%. The second is to optimize the ecological layout, experts or city managers can evaluate multiple urban planning schemes or strategic suggestions in the digital space, calculate and evaluate ecological environment indicators in real time, and select the optimal solution.
It is predicted that by 2030, the application of digital twin technologies will save costs for urban planning, construction and operation to reach $280 billion in terms of market size, the global digital twin market size will be $3.1 billion in 2020, and the global digital twin market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 58% to reach $48.2 billion by 2026.
▲Global digital twin market size forecast
China's digital twin city construction market is active. According to statistics, the total scale of investment in China's new smart cities in 2020 is about 2.4 trillion yuan, especially in recent years, China's urban information model (CIM) construction projects have shown a rapid growth trend year by year, the number of projects has increased from 2 in 2018 to 72 in 2021 (as of September 2021), and the total investment has also increased year by year with the number of projects. In August 2021, the World Economic Forum and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology jointly solicited digital twin city cases, according to the statistics of this project, more than half of the investment projects accounted for 10 million yuan, 89% of the investment projects above the million yuan level, and the average investment in projects reached 28 million yuan.
▲Annual distribution of the number of urban information model projects in China
Second, the "4+5 framework", a key element of the digital twin city
Combined with the global digital twin research perspective and the actual case of digital twin cities, the construction of digital twin cities mainly covers 9 major elements, presenting a "4+5" element framework, including 4 internal elements, namely infrastructure, data resources, platform capabilities, application scenarios, and 5 external elements, namely strategy and mechanism, stakeholders, funds and business models, standards and evaluations, and network security.
▲Digital twin city key element architecture
▲Digital twin city feature view
Information infrastructure becomes the data base for digital twin cities. IoT perception facilities and city-level IoT platforms are tentacles for sensing the operation status of the city and also provide an entrance to the remote control of urban components. The demand for massive data aggregation and real-time data processing in digital twins puts forward higher requirements for urban cloud network resources, 5G networks, narrowband ubiquitous perceptual networks, all-optical networks and other network facilities provide channels for the Interconnection of All Things, multi-level data storage centers and cloud data centers meet the needs of global full data storage, and advanced computing facilities such as high-performance computing, distributed computing, AI computing, cloud computing and edge computing provide efficient and reliable computing power guarantee for digital twins.
The construction of a digital twin city requires the support of a city-level platform to provide a unified dialogue interface, operating system and development soil for digital twin cities. The city-level platform is the core hub of the digital twin city, connecting all kinds of infrastructure downwards, bringing together multi-source data such as urban operation and urban components.
The platform provides a low-cost, accessible, all-factor development platform for various application developments, significantly reducing the development costs of governments and enterprises, and at the same time, the platform provides a variety of technical capabilities such as digital twin simulation deduction and spatial computing, providing multi-dimensional capability support for enterprises to develop digital twin applications and citizens to enjoy virtual and real fusion services.
▲ Architectural elements of the digital twin cities
Digital twin city applications have penetrated into many fields such as urban production, life, and ecology. Application scenarios are the source of vitality for digital twin cities. For example, through digital twin simulation lighting and shadow intensity, optimize the brightness and darkness of street lamps, so that urban lighting can achieve a balance in terms of safety and energy saving, and achieve livable and low-carbon; through digital twin technology, energy fine utilization and operation and maintenance, carbon trajectory tracking, to help achieve carbon neutrality. At the same time, digital twin technology can realize the overall perception and deduction of urban people, places and things, help cities to carry out comprehensive systematic and reasonable pre-judgment planning and design, avoid "demolition and construction", and achieve "one blueprint to build to the end".
▲The proportion of applications in digital boxing city projects
The formulation of strategies and mechanisms will optimize the policy environment of digital twin cities and promote the standardized, orderly and healthy development of digital twin cities. Strategies and mechanisms mainly include national, regional, city and other levels of informatization strategy, planning, implementation plan, action plan, to promote the development of digital twin-related industries, digital twin development of governance principles, ethical norms, etc. As of the end of June 2021, major economies such as China, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom have issued national policies to promote the research, construction and application of digital twin technologies; Many provinces and cities such as Shanghai and Zhejiang in China have issued relevant policies to explore the construction of digital twin cities.
Third, three major challenges, digital twin cities have a long way to go
1. The challenge of scientific understanding and value cognition
Industry and society lack an objective and rational understanding of digital twin cities. The digital twin city is still in the exploratory stage, and its overall maturity, technological comprehensiveness, and theoretical innovation are still in the process of development and evolution. If you rely on a single technical perspective, it is easy to form a one-sided understanding similar to that of a blind person touching an elephant. For example, excessive reliance on three-dimensional modeling of cities and visual presentation of urban components, while analog simulation deductions and virtual-real integration interactions that are equally important or even more prominent in the characteristics of digital twins have not received corresponding attention, and digital twin cities have "lame" development.
Rely on visual modeling forests to ignore the ultimate value of simulation deduction and optimization reality. The development and maturity of digital twin cities is not only determined by supply, but also by essential needs. In promoting the construction of digital twin cities, some cities pay too much attention to the refined reproduction of "one mountain, one stone" and "one city and one scene" through high-tech technology, and lack in-depth analysis of application needs and goals, resulting in a disconnection between urban planning, construction, management, service and other businesses of digital twin technology, resulting in digital twin technology becoming a flashy "vase". In the short term, the realistic presentation of urban images has certain practical significance for the creation of city business cards, but in the medium and long term, with the continuous increase of technological evolution and investment, this cognitive model cannot tap the core value of releasing digital twin cities to control time and space and fine control.
2. Challenges of data governance and privacy security
The limited collection of urban IoT perception data has led to insufficient application depth. The data collection ability is uneven, the underlying key data cannot be effectively perceived, the multi-dimensional and multi-scale data collection is inconsistent, especially the construction of IoT and other IoT perception facilities is uneven, which will lead to the development of digital twin cities showing mostly pre-model, most simulation demonstration, and most virtual simulation, and the depth of application of real-time dynamic perception and urban spatial scale twin interaction is not enough.
The standardized governance of urban multi-source heterogeneous data is insufficient. At present, because the digital twin city is in the exploration period, the standard specification lags behind the industry practice. The digital twin city has seven countries and eight systems, lacks norms, relies more on various vendor solutions, has poor system interoperability, does not have a relatively unified technical architecture consensus and data entry standards, and is more difficult to achieve the integration, integration and unified processing of multiple heterogeneous data, resulting in disadvantages such as low data quality and insufficient governance efficiency.
Centralized processing of massive data has led to an increased risk of data security and privacy breaches. Data sources are multi-faceted, and data storage and processing are highly concentrated in centralized institutions such as urban intelligent hubs, which may lead to the paralysis of urban operation under network risks such as hacking and security attacks. In addition, many video data collection and trajectory analysis in digital twin cities involve some citizens' privacy, and if they cannot be effectively anonymized and set up reasonable permissions to control data, it is easy to cause abuse of personal privacy.
3. Support resource and business sustainability challenges
Insufficient compound human resources. In order to accurately and completely understand the digital twin city, understand and tap its practical path and development potential, it is urgent to integrate urban management, demand analysis, digital technology, algorithm model and other talents and teams, study and refine scientific theoretical problems, and jointly explore the interaction law of twin virtual reality. At present, digital twin cities are mainly itIT, surveying and mapping and other professional practitioners, and there is a large demand for compound talents in the fields of model algorithms and business analysis, but the support of talent teams is insufficient.
Industry algorithm model resources in the city are lacking. Digital twin cities involve multi-dimensional and multi-industry systems, and there is an urgent need for industry expertise and industry models in all aspects of data, models and interactions. At present, in addition to the relatively mature model library in the fields of transportation and architecture, many urban governance fields lack interconnection basic knowledge library and industry simulation model, which has caused certain obstacles to the deepening development of digital twins.
The transition of the business model depends on government input. The high research investment in digital twin cities is difficult to translate into practical application benefits, so the government has become a major source of funding for the development of digital twin technologies. When the digital twin technology is systematized and mature, it is urgent to attract the participation of market entities such as citizens and institutions in a larger range, innovate the business model of the digital twin city, and form a development pattern of risk sharing and benefit sharing.
Zhidong believes that although the digital twin technology is becoming more and more mature, urban construction still faces many challenges, its understanding is still relatively one-sided, its value perception is not yet uniform, the aggregation of massive data has increased the risk of digital security and privacy protection, compound talent resources, industry knowledge resources are lacking, and innovative business models still need to be deepened.
The recognition, understanding and disenchantment of digital spastic technology, the exploration, discussion and consensus based on the governance framework of digital conjugation, and the incubation, support and standardization of application scenarios are all long-term and important tasks, which require the cooperation of multi-stakeholders and common progress.