Digital twins technologies, which present a lot of benefits for Industry 4.0, have taken a step further. A team of researchers from the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Stuttgart (HLRS) and the Fraunhofer Institute have developed a digital twin for the German city of Herrenberg in order to promote sustainable urban planning.
Herrenberg is a German city in the Böblingen district of Baden-Württemberg with 31,000 inhabitants and, according to the perspective of Fabian Dembski, who works at the intersection of architecture, urban planning and computer science, cities are much more than the places where we live. They function like living organisms, growing and changing over time. Therefore, decisions made in city planning can improve or degrade the health of urban spaces.
As cities have become larger and more complicated, and technology has opened up new ways of observing and simulating the dynamic processes of cities, researchers have sought to find new ways to make city planning decisions be more efficient, equitable and inclusive. The digital models thus make it possible to predict how changes in their design could affect life in the city.
To recreate Herrenberg, the researchers used supercomputing and virtual reality visualization to develop comprehensive models of urban environments, designed to support city planning and traffic management, adapting the ‘digital twin’ concept for cities, using High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies to analyze, integrate and visualize data describing urban phenomena in order to simulate the processes that are important to consider in urban planning. They claim that Herrenberg’s study has already provided valuable information for city planners and government officials in the state of Baden-Württemberg, and has paved the way for improving the model to include additional types of data.
The approach begins with the idea that life in a city is the result of complex interactions between many factors. With the availability of new sensors and other digital tools to produce high-quality data, researchers can now collect large data sets representing air quality, traffic flow, and the prevalence of pedestrian traffic, among other dimensions of the urban life. By merging these large data sets using supercomputers and visualizing them in virtual reality, it is easier to understand their complex interactions – for example, to see how a change in traffic patterns or a new building could affect air quality.
It starts from the spatial syntax , which produces a 2D scheme of physical grids in a city; then, geographic information system (GIS) data and traffic control system data are incorporated to incorporate realistic topography, road geometry, and traffic flows in more detail.
The experts also developed an app that invited Herrenberg residents to send their emotional responses to different areas of the city. Residents provided qualitative data on whether certain locations are comfortable, unsafe, or ugly, for example. “Emotions such as joy and fear, the aesthetic experience of green spaces and architecture, and other emotion-driven factors play an important role in the success of urban design, but are very difficult to represent in architectural models or simulations. . Our approach is an early attempt to collect and incorporate these very complicated data sets, ”says Dembski.
Using a 3D laser scanner, the researchers also created a 3D visualization of the city center of Herrenberg. The team could integrate the visualizations of its various data sets into an immersive virtual reality model, allowing abstract data to come to life. For Dembski and his colleagues, this element takes the work one step closer to visualizing a city in a more realistic way.
“Cities are not one-dimensional, so there is no point in designing them on a sheet of paper,” Dembski said. “The third dimension helps us understand cities and their spatiality. Especially in the context of conventional urban planning and development, the “view” or perception of space on a human scale is often forgotten. Many people cannot imagine abstract planning on the scale of 1: 1,000 or 1: 10,000 ”, concludes the expert.
In the near future, they will evaluate the possibility of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) applications to better represent the multiple factors that affect how citizens emotionally experience their cities.
Referencia: Urban Digital Twins for Smart Cities and Citizens: The Case Study of Herrenberg, Germany. Fabian Dembski et al. Sustainability 2020, 12(6), 2307. DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062307
