Urban areas are becoming increasingly complex as cities grow and evolve to meet the demands of modern life. In the last 50 years, the changes have been staggering. Routine police patrols have been eclipsed by CCTV cameras and facial recognition software, timed traffic cameras are being replaced with AI-powered ones that can adapt in real-time to the reality on the ground, human conductors on trains, buses and trams have been replaced with fare gates and tap-to-pay systems. All of these shifts have been made in the name of efficiency, of guaranteeing agility in the face of changing urban environments as populations swell and put increasing pressure on existing infrastructure.
Those changes are far from over – there will be many in the years to come that might still surprise us. To effectively understand what parts of city living require adaptations and optimizations and to plan them in a detailed, efficient way, city planners are increasingly turning to virtual twins. A virtual replica of buildings, streets, neighborhoods, networks and entire cities, virtual twins contain all the components and data necessary for understanding, predicting and planning urban management changes needed.
But what exactly is involved in building and integrating a virtual twin into the urban planning workflow? If you’ve ever been curious about how city officials and planners manage urban design in a virtual setting, read on.
The art of building a virtual city
Building a virtual twin is as much an art as it is a science. The first step to creating one begins by collecting and aggregating massive amounts of relevant data. Some cities embark on this journey on their own, building a virtual twin from scratch. Other urban locales choose another route, enlisting the help of a white glove option like the Urban Virtual Twin as a Service, in which experts manage the import and sorting of data and run simulations and analyses on behalf of a city. When the twin is being built for the city, instead of by it, the data collection process is lengthy and involved: not only do experts feed the data provided to them by urban planners and city officials, but they go the extra mile to prepare data.
“Today cities possess much data, often unstructured and spread across various formats, sources and systems,” explained Simon Cozzarin,a technical consultant within the Dassault Systèmes Cities & Public Services sector. “We help them capture missing data by working with specialized third-party partners and bring everything together on a collaborative platform, at the core of which is a virtual twin of the city.” By accessing all available information, the virtual twin that’s constructed depicts not just a virtual representation of a street, neighborhood or entire city, but a shared holistic understanding of the city’s overall situation.
Once enough data has been compiled, the next step in the process is feeding it into the twin. While it might seem like any data collected might be easily understood, sometimes it’s not so straightforward. In fact, there’s an entire industry dedicated to enabling companies and governments to do just this – it’s a core component of what NETVIBES empowers both internal teams and customers to do. Once it’s living in a unified space, it can be mapped into a digital replica of a building, street, neighborhood, network or entire city.
The best virtual twins will be the ones with the most amount of detail. With the advent and growing use of artificial intelligence, this is more possible now than ever. AI tools can pick up on patterns that a human might miss and that sort of information can be critical in identifying urban challenges that require creative solutions to address.
Cities face a growing number of challenges in need of innovative solutions. By creating virtual twins of targeted areas to understand specific constraints and explore simulations of potential actions, urban planners and officials are able to make informed decisions. Through this methodology, it’s possible to build, step-by-step, virtual twins that encapsulate everything from rudimentary items like maps of train and bus lines, waste management routes, locations of power plants and other pieces of major infrastructure to more complex informatics on road usage from a geographical information system, information from air quality sensors, usage statistics on ridership of public transportation lines and more. Combining all these kinds of information allows for the building of a holistic virtual twin that will best reflect a city’s reality, whether in a single block or an entire metropolis.
Urban challenges addressed by virtual twins
Virtual twins offer the unique ability to enable city planners to identify tailored solutions for complex urban problems. Some such problems come with obvious solutions, though others are trickier to address. For both the simple and the complicated, virtual twins offer a method for identifying potential fixes and appropriate policies to carry them out.
Our solutions help anticipate the future by simulating future public policies before implementing them,” said Vérène Issautier, the marketing director for the Cities and Public Services sector at Dassault Systèmes. “We’re really about understanding city challenges and their objectives, such as improving air quality, reducing traffic congestion, developing a new urban area to welcome new dwellers, preventing risks of flooding, just to name a few. By simulating different scenarios, urban decision makers have access to science-based information to make informed decisions to elaborate public policies while considering their future impact before implementing them.”
Let’s see how a virtual twin can enable that to happen.
The French city of Meudon, home to more than 45,000 people, has for years made enacting environmentally-friendly policies part of its core mission to improve the lives of its citizens. Their latest effort, carried out in coordination with Dassault Systèmes’ SIMULIA brand, aims to reduce the impact of urban heat islands in three public squares within the city. Urban heat islands refer to the tendency of urban areas to be warmer than their suburban and rural counterparts, owing to factors such as a high concentration of heat-emitting vehicles, HVAC systems and other heat sources. To achieve the mission of implementing environmentally-conscious policies, Meudon’s leaders built a virtual twin that enables them to visualize the city’s targeted spaces and to understand the way sunlight and wind patterns create or mitigate heat in those spaces. The results of the simulations that have been run will enable the city’s leadership to enact policies – like planting new trees in particularly warm areas and changing building facades to mitigate rising temperatures – that lower urban heat island effects and concurrently improve the lives of Meudon’s residents. Running such simulations enables the smartest decision-making possible: it puts the greatest amount of information in the hands of those who need it. In this way, it can also act as a powerful tool for sustainable urban development, as it allows those in power to predict with great accuracy the consequences of all kinds of city projects.
Consider another scenario: say a city is considering an urban mobility project to extend a train line further into a neighborhood or suburb to address antiquated traffic patterns and congestion issues emanating from a particular area. Before they can break ground, construction crews and engineers alike require mappings that highlight the unique geological, topographical and demographical specifications of a given space. Using GEOVIA’s Urban Planning tool, everyone from the foreman on the ground to the architect in the office has access to a single source of truth, even for the most complex projects. It enables an elegant, unified map for each and every simulation so workers across the board can understand how to best approach the task at hand to minimize disruptions to the natural and built environment as well as the existing population. The urban planning tool and the virtual twin it serves both live within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, which offers a singular space for collaboration across all stakeholders, including those on the ground and those in an office miles away.
Building tomorrow’s cities with virtual twins
The concept of a virtual twin is as transformative as it is essential when it comes to mapping out, planning, modeling and simulating urban development projects. This kind of revolutionary approach to city planning is exactly what the 21st century demands, as cities face mounting challenges such as population growth, climate change and resource scarcity.
Through the collaborative nature of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, it’s possible to identify solutions for any number of interconnected challenges a city might face. When it comes to issues like public safety, noise pollution, public transportation, physical infrastructure, traffic flows, energy use and resource management, there’s hardly ever only one party that needs to be involved. By bringing together individuals from across a city’s agencies and departments through a unified platform, it’s possible to innovate and advance together.
Above all else, though, virtual twins for urban modeling represent the key to achieving impactful policy changes that change cities for the better.
“Virtual twins allow cities to make science-based decisions,” Issautier said. “Through simulations, cities can analyze current conditions and explore various options for achieving their goals,” whatever those goals might be.
We might not have flying cars or hoverboards à la Back to the Future, but what we do have are tools like virtual twins that enable urban transformation on an incredible scale.
By harnessing advanced technologies such as AI, data analytics and simulations, virtual twins allow urban planners to evaluate the impacts of proposed changes, from traffic flow optimization to sustainable building designs. They can even simulate how cities might respond to natural disasters or altered climate patterns, giving city planners a valuable tool to build resilience into future designs.
By accurately creating a virtual replica of urban areas and predicting outcomes from proposed optimizations and changes to them, planners, developers and policymakers can find real solutions to complex urban challenges. Whether it’s reducing carbon emissions, improving public transportation or creating smarter infrastructure to architect a smart city, the virtual twin offers a way to test ideas, minimize risks and make more informed decisions. As cities continue to evolve, this cutting-edge approach will undoubtedly play a critical role in shaping the urban environments of tomorrow.