What if we tell you that the age of AI is bringing your imagination to reality? The human mind works in fabulous and astonishing ways. Sometimes, when we close our eyes, we see, feel, touch, and experience our ideas clearly and accurately. However, the calculations, logistics, and mistakes take time and resources to translate this concept into reality. The Digital Twin technology is the technology of the future, and it will take us there faster, so we can minimize loss & damage – it will take us there virtually first.
Read more: How Digital Twins are revolutionizing Manufacturing and Smart Cities
Digitally transforming your organization can be fraught with complexities and roadblocks, so you need a kind of “navigator” to help with the journey.
One of Gartner’s recommendations is to create a digital twin of your organization (DTO) to assist in the navigation. “Without some sort of a “navigator,” the risk of failure increases dramatically as the scope and pace of the digital business initiative expands.”
As technologies like the Internet of Things, virtual reality and augmented reality mature, city planners can build virtual replicas of urban infrastructure to better respond to local energy and environmental changes.
Imagine the potential benefits of having a nearly complete digital replica of a city — a virtual model of its roads, buildings and public spaces — combined with real-time information feeds from sensors and other data sources. Residents could visualize the impact of new construction before breaking ground. First responders could run computer simulations to prepare for potential emergency scenarios. And city planners could better analyze and respond to local energy and environmental changes.
Read more: Digital Twin Technology Can Make Smart Cities Even Smarter
The need to increase resilience and optimise asset and resource management in light of COVID-19 will be among the key drivers for the growth of city digital twins over the next five years, according to ABI Research. The global tech market advisory firm anticipates that the number of urban digital twins will exceed 500 by 2025, and that implementation will expand beyond limited pilots to widespread multi-purpose deployments.
Dominique Bonte, Vice President, End Markets at ABI Research, said: “Real-time 3D models of cities’ built environment allow scenario analysis through the simulation of the potential impact of natural disasters like flooding, [adoption of] generative design principles for new city developments [which optimise] energy savings and solar capacity, and saving costs by operating cities more efficiently and effectively.”
Read more: COVID-19 expected to drive adoption of city digital twins
According to the latest research from ABI Research, the installed base of digital twin and city modelling deployments is expected to grow from just a handful of early implementations in 2019 to more than 500 by 2025.
“Originally developed for industrial systems, the digital twin concept is now spreading to the smart cities environment,” says Dominique Bonte, vice president for End Markets at ABI Research. “However, it won’t be a single Uber-like digital twin for an entire city but rather an aggregation and integration of domain-specific digital twins for systems like smart buildings, traffic infrastructure, energy grids, and water management.”
Read more: Digital twin concept spreads into smart city environments