New Urban Use Cases Drive Over 500 Cities to Adopt Digital Twins by 2025

With digital twins having made their appearance in cities over the last few years, mainly in the form of pilots showcasing limited capabilities, their more widespread deployment as multi-purpose urban decision and management tools is now imminent, not in the least driven by COVID-19 requirements in terms of achieving increased resilience levels and optimized asset and demand-response resource management. Digital twin deployments will exceed 500 by 2025, according to global tech market advisory firm, ABI Research.

“Real-time 3D models of a cities’ built environment allow scenario analysis through the simulation of the potential impact of natural disasters like flooding, adopt generative design principles for new city developments  optimizing energy savings and solar capacity, and saving costs by operating cities more efficiently and effectively,” explains Dominique Bonte, Vice President End Markets at ABI Research

Since the first urban digital twins’ deployments by vendors like Dassault Systèmes in cities such as Singapore only three years ago, feature sets are now rapidly expanding to enable a much wider range of application areas:

• Infrastructure Coverage Planning - Light poles, 5G, Wi-Fi, Video Surveillance
• Indoor Airflow Simulation – Optimized interior designs to minimize spread of Covid-19
• Resilience and Emergency Response – Real-time view on city assets and resources
• Open Platforms and Marketplaces – Driving third party GovTech ecosystem integration
• Transversal Governance and Citizen Participation – Support for Cross-vertical policies and citizen engagement
• Green Infrastructure Management – Monitoring and maintenance of green spaces
• Vehicle Electrification and Smart Mobility Deployments - Simulation of impact on air and noise pollution to inform policies
• Sustainability and Circularity – Digital twins enable renewable energy maximization and recycling optimization

“The digital twin ecosystem system activity is growing quickly with more suppliers announcing more deployments in more cities. Vendors like Dassault Systèmes and Engie subsidiary Siradel are paving the way for extending urban digital twins to marketplaces and opening access to key metrics and dashboards to the citizens themselves, increasing their overall involvement and helping gain approval of city government decisions and policies,” Bonte says.  

Cityzenith recently donated its SmartWorldPro2 digital twin platform to selected cities to help them become carbon neutral as part of the global ‘Clean Cities – Clean Future’ campaign. Bentley Systems partnered with Microsoft to integrate Azure IoT Digital Twins and Azure Maps into its iTwins platform. The City of Helsinki won the Bentley Systems award for its Digital City Synergy project aimed at helping the city improve collaboration and get more value from its city models.

These findings are from ABI Research’s Smart Cities and Smart Spaces quarterly update report. This report is part of the company’s Smart Cities and Smart Spaces research service, which includes research, data, and analyst insights.