Urban Digital Twins: data integration levels from conceptualization to technical implementation

IMANE JEDDOUB | In progress

Summary

Digital Twins (DTs) for cities are starting to gain significant interest in urban and geospatial fields. However, the whole concept remains ambiguous and presents some challenges that need to be addressed. Indeed, the original concept of DTs has been adjusted to meet several urban requirements.

Cities worldwide start investing in developing Urban Digital Twins as a new digital approach to collecting, integrating, managing, visualizing, and sharing data and models. Urban Digital Twins bring both potentialities and issues. Data integration is identified as a significant challenge associated with the full implementation of the Urban Digital Twin concept. While data integration has been considered a fundamental issue in 3D GIS for a decade, it is still involved in the development of new concepts such as Digital Twins, which integrate multiple and heterogeneous data. Indeed, addressing the data integration issue will enrich the existing 3D city models and deliver a mature version of the Digital Twins.

Our research topic is motivated by the fact that DTs, by their nature, require the integration of various data since they are generated from heterogeneous techniques, span different time and spatial scales, are stored in different systems through various technologies and syntax, have different forms and schemas, and require interoperability between incompatible systems (for example, BIM-GIS). Considering the heterogeneous nature of the data required to build DTs for cities, it presents challenges in integrating them for further use and urban applications. Hence, we suggested working on defining the effective level of data integration by assessing the different levels of data integration in the context of DTs for cities as they are implemented in practice. Indeed, data integration in a DT is still a completely new research field, which remains critical in creating DTs and requires a generic and standardized approach. The particularity of this research topic is that it takes into consideration the conceptual part of the concept and the practical part by assessing and benchmarking the most documented DTs for city initiatives. Based on an in-depth analysis of the current implementations, the heterogeneity of the technical and technological frameworks reveals a lack of a specific and generic approach to data integration. Thus, data integration needs to be tackled in a comprehensive way, especially while using 3D city models as the input layer for UDTs. To support data integration, we need to understand how data is integrated into UDTs in practice. The focus of our research is almost exclusively on the technical levels of data integration (conceptual data model level, database level, application level). The aim is to analyze, illustrate, and guide the effectiveness of different data integration approaches.

Comments

This doctoral research is part of the project GIS 3.0 that demonstrates the convergence of Geographic Information Systems and Web 3.0: Semantic Web techniques, object-oriented prototype languages (JavaScript, JSON,) and document-oriented NoSQL databases. The research project (PDR) is funded by the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research FNRS.

Links

• Jeddoub, I., Nys, G.-A., Hajji, R., & Billen, R. Digital Twins for cities: Analyzing the gap between concepts and current implementations with a specific focus on data integration. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 122, 103440. doi:10.1016/j.jag.2023.103440 https://hdl.handle.net/2268/306145
• Jeddoub, Imane, Zouhair Ballouch, Rafika Hajji, et Roland Billen. 2024. « Enriched Semantic 3D Point Clouds: An Alternative to 3D City Models for Digital Twin for Cities? » In Recent Advances in 3D Geoinformation Science, édité par Thomas H. Kolbe, Andreas Donaubauer, et Christof Beil, 407‑23. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43699-4_26.