Digital twin implementations at the regional and city levels

This chapter presents two regional and city-level digital twin (CDT) prototypes, for the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC) in Cambridge, in the UK, and the Chinese town of Poli, in the southwest of the West Coast New District of Qingdao, respectively. Confronting a number of pressures and challenges brought by exponential growth in urbanisation and population, this section presents a socio-technical perspective on CDT design and implementation. The development of these two CDT prototypes incorporates two interconnected research streams – stakeholder engagement and technical digital twin solutions. On the one hand, in the CBC case, findings of stakeholder engagement indicate a high-level consensus on the basic requirements for CDTs, such as transparency in data collection and algorithm design. They also highlight that CDTs should be considered as part of a multifaceted evidence base, facilitating – rather than replacing – democratic debate and deliberation in policy decision-making. However, varying and possibly conflicting expectations have been observed across the various relevant stakeholder groups. On the other hand, in terms of the technical digital twin solution, a novel algorithm is developed for detecting car user groups by trip purpose in the CBC, using historical city-scale traffic sensing data. The modelling exercise demonstrates the unexploited value in existing datasets and sheds light on the design of future data collection schemes. In the case of Poli Town, an innovative combination of a city information modelling (CIM) graphic engine and integrated data resources centre (IDRC) was proposed and applied, as a technical CIM route to guarantee the implementation of the CDT solution.