Virtualizing Urban Environments: Smart Cities with Digital Twins

Digital twins are now firmly established in supporting urban management. The city state of Singapore is working on a digital twin of its entire nation. In 2011, the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) began developing three-dimensional maps of the nation.
 
GPS Lands Singapore, which provides services to create content for digital twins, approached SLA, proposing working on a digital twin of the entire nation: “The digital twin displays all of Singapore in a highly detailed 3D representation…to help with asset management and decision-making, including detailed tree and green space management.”
 
Because of the country’s limited size, urban areas are at a premium, and therefore many infrastructure networks and assets have been moved underground. For that reason, “the SLA is now working on the next stage of the project, a national subsurface digital twin of Singapore”. The benefits of such a digital representation extend to safety improvements and minimising service disruptions when maintaining, repairing, or constructing assets underground.
 
Meanwhile, Virtual Singapore is “a 3D digital replica of Singapore built on topographical as well as real-time, dynamic data. It will be the country’s authoritative platform that can be used in simulations and virtual tests of new solutions to urban planning problems.”


Source: Computer Weekly