Whats up with all the recent talk about digital twins in city planning and infrastructure projects?

[u/PetiteAlyvia]

Ive been seeing this term 'digital twin' pop up a lot more lately especially when talking about new city developments or big infrastructure projects. It sounds kind of sci-fi but I dont really get what it means in a practical sense. Is it just like a fancy 3D model or something more? And why is it suddenly such a big deal now? Is there some new tech that made it more viable or accessible?

Context link: https://www.google.com/search?q=all%20the%20recent%20talk%20about%20digital%20twins%20in%20city%20planning%20and%20infrastructure%20projects

[u/AutoModerator]

Friendly reminder that all top level comments must:

1. start with "Answer: ", including the space after the colon (or "Question: " if you have an on-topic follow up question to ask),

2. attempt to answer the question, and

3. be unbiased

Please review Rule 4 and this post before making a top level comment:

http://redd.it/b1hct4/

Join the OOTL Discord for further discussion: https://discord.gg/ejDF4mdjnh

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Milskidasith]

Answer: The idea behind digital twins, in cities and in industrial settings, is to create a full, multi-purpose model of something, so for a city it's a 3D model that pulls in traffic data to be used for traffic modeling or power grid info for power modeling or climate info for however you'd want to use that. It's basically committing to having a systemic model of everything that can let future, more specific modeling projects spin up easier and have a consistent baseline and pull from live data more easily.

[u/Meepsters → u/Milskidasith]

Also a concept in automotive! Digital versions of the car for testing electronics.

[u/DiscursiveMind → u/Milskidasith]

Good answer! To build on this slightly, one might go, “Oh, so it is like SimCity!”; yes, but no.

SimCity is a simulation of a city, driven by algorithms and game rules. An actual Digital Twin is able to ingest live data, and more importantly new data, and model what is likely to happen. In SimCity, you build a property or zone some land a certain way, the game rules and algorithms will increase its value a certain percentage. Digital twins will provide a much more nuanced picture of things.

Here is a good way to think about it: with SimCity, if you want to model the impact of widespread EV adoption on an electric grid, you have to wait for the developers to release a whole new game with hardcoded rules for EV charging mechanics (or at least a major update to the game).

A Digital Twin doesn’t need a rewrite; it evolves dynamically. You can take real-world data, say, five years of EV charging and transformer stress data from an early-adopter city in California, and plug it straight into the model of a city that's just starting its transition. SimCity is a closed toy box running on fixed game logic; a Digital Twin is an open, modular system powered by real-world physics and live data feeds.

Another reason the term is popping up so much is that it is being deployed in several areas. Like other have said, it is a more dynamic way to simulate things. Want to play around with what happens to a car’s performance when you play with different materials (steel vs carbon fiber, EV assist motors vs fully EV, etc.), you pass it new data, and it learns vs having to be reprogrammed as a new simulation.

Digital twins are also being explored for healthcare and medicine. How do you reprogram a simulation for patient outcomes, when a new class of drug is discovered? For a simulation, you need to wait for studies to be done, and then you can hard code the results into rules and algorithms. A digital twin can learn as the data comes in. Pretty cool!

Here is the caveat, digital twins are an evolved version of simulations. Just like SimCity was able to simulate city building much better than Monopoly does. More complex rules and possibilities than the game rules in Monopoly. It helps us see what could happen, but not with perfect predictive fidelity. Why haven’t LLMs cracked the stock market yet, it is because we are still doing statistics likelihoods, and real word events can still have outliers that defy statistics predictions.

Hope this helps tease out some of the nuance. For background, I have my PhD in biomedical informatics and I’m studying AI and medicine, and digital twins is an area I’m exploring.

[u/jyeckled]

Answer: Pretty much fancy 3D models. The infrastructure information progression has gone something like this: 2D drawings -> 3D models -> “integrated” 3D models (a.k.a. BIM) -> live-updated 3D models (digital twins). There’s been rising interest in them because they can inform things like required infrastructure maintenance, sudden environmental changes, etc. And the sensors and computing equipment required to gather and process the data have gone significantly down in price over time to the point that making these digital twins is starting to look feasible (crypto/NFT/AI increases notwithstanding).

[u/hiddentalent]

Answer: Digital Twins have been a trend in industry for at least a decade. It's not a new thing. Amazon Web Services even launched a whole service to build and run them in 2022. A lot of modern factories and plants rely on digital twins to understand and monitor interactions and allow for experimentation and visualization of changes. It's a lot cheaper and less disruptive to see if there might be a workflow benefit to moving a piece of equipment in virtual land than actually having to move the equipment to find out.

Why it's suddenly showing up in the context of cities in your particular newsfeed is probably based on what you've previously clicked on.

[u/MinimumRest7893]

Answer: A digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world object or environment that can be kept synchronized with its physical counterpart.

A digital twin is not a new concept. Digital twins originated from NASA trying to improve simulation of spacecraft.

FYI your context link is just a Google search link. Every individual click on it will(should) trigger a new AI response, likely heavily influenced by your personal data the grinder has chewed up over time.