Page 70 - Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

e. Digital twin for disaster risk planning to help increase environmental resilience

A digital twin is a virtual model, replica or representation of a physical object, product, service, process,
system or geographic location. It essentially builds a bridge between the virtual and physical worlds
that allows the analysis of data to identify, avoid or mitigate problems before they even occur, and
then to identify new opportunities and develop plans for the future by simulating how a physical
object, product, service, process, system or geographic location will be affected by chosen variables,
i.e. inputs. Subsets within the digital twin concept include a predictive twin, process twin and product
twin, among others. While the concept itself is not new, technological progression is now at a point
where connectivity levels and machine intelligence are advanced enough to apply and demonstrate
the large-scale advantages of digital twins. The technology behind digital twins has extended to include
entire systems such as organizations and even cities.
211, 212, 213
When it comes to digitizing a highly multi-faceted, complex and dynamic entity such as a city, a digital
twin project will always be a large-scale, cross-collaborative undertaking (across sectors and industries)
that brings together all the data on the city’s areas, buildings, infrastructure, flows, environment, and
the way the city is used into either a federation of composite sets of models or all models under an
overarching framework of an integrated city model. As the digital twin technology matures, more
than one twin may be commissioned, with some cities employing digital quintuplets or more, each
of which will interact with the physical twin (triplet, etc.) and with each other, while focusing on
solutions to its own assigned problem.
214, 215
Figure 23 illustrates a digital twin rendering for a city.

Figure 23: Sample view of a city's digital twin [xxiii]

Within the context of climate change and response, digital twins are an attractive proposition,
particularly for cities that are growing rapidly in population, size and energy consumption and that
need efficient management and maintenance of all their systems. The increasing unpredictability of
weather events due to climate change are a prime example of the kind of challenge for which cities
need prevention, mitigation or adaptation strategies, including the design of resilient infrastructures
and systems.

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