Digital Twins For All

Jannat Maqbool, Interim Executive Director – NZ, Smart Cities Council Australia New Zealand

We have less than a decade left to make significant productivity, equity and sustainability gains for our communities, and the Smart Cities Council is going ‘all in’ on the enabling power of data activation, believing the digital twin is the superior approach.

As our cities and built environment focus on enabling better services and value for citizens, delivering greater economic value, and achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions from our assets, addressing these priorities will depend on our ability to enhance our city and infrastructure planning processes, as well as our methods for building and operating assets, and delivering social services. This of course is possible, but requires a new generation of tools, approaches and mindsets. The Smart Cities Council believes the Digital twin is exactly this.

With this in mind, in 2020, the Smart Cities Council launched the Australia New Zealand Digital Twin Hub and released the Digital Twin Guidance Note. A year later, the Council hosted the New Zealand Digital

Twin Summit and shared the Australia New Zealand Digital Twin Strategy Draft Blueprint. It is now facilitating the inaugural Digital Twin Challenge, positioning our region as a leader in the global push to accelerate more productive, sustainable and liveable built and natural environments through the leveraging of digital twins.

So, what is a digital twin?

The common definition for the digital twin is ‘a digital replica of a physical thing’. The Centre for Digital Built Digital Twin: a realistic digital representation of something physical. What distinguishes a digital twin from any other digital model is its connection to the physical twin.

Britain defines the digital twin as a realistic digital representation of something physical. What distinguishes a digital twin from any other digital model is its connection to the physical twin. It’s the second sentence that is fundamental. The physical reality is talking to the digital model.

The digital twin provides connection, integration, analytics, simulation, and visualisation, presenting significant potential for ‘activating data’. The digital twin, through this lens, thus becomes a tool for directing investment in the most sustainable infrastructure and citizen services with precision like we’ve never seen and will accelerate climate action, productivity and the wellbeing of the community.

In Australia, the City of Darwin refers to a digital twin ‘souffle’ – people, economy, data and infrastructure, and equipment, as a digitised platform for evaluation and interpretation of information, funding and resources to predict impact. Melbourne has completed a digital twin pilot as an intuitive city solution that responds to the city, highlighting the importance of community engagement and clear communication to encourage trust and understanding of data and project intentions.

For the City of Hobart, there are three key drivers to the digital twin project – contextual multi-modal visualisation, integrated digital reform and economic investment friction. Use cases range from monitoring urban canopy, traffic modelling and density mapping to public transport planning, business and commercialisation opportunities for communications and data-intensive industries, and visualising new developments, driving the establishment of data-sharing models across stakeholders, making the City of Hobart project one for the shortlist.

Closer to home, Wellington City Council’s investment into a digital twin is helping aid community trust, information sharing and governing a digital infrastructure of collaboration.

The Digital Twin Guidance Note

Created with input from both private and public sector stakeholders, the note provides clarity on what a digital twin is, its benefits, and how to prepare a strategy for their application. It also draws from an important resource released by the Spatial Information Council for Australia and New Zealand (ANZLIC) in late 2019 – the principles for spatially enabled digital twins of the built and natural environment in Australia. The guidance note supports these principles, and builds on them to provide further information to policymakers and practitioners.

Consistently the themes of user experience, data, platforms and tools, infrastructure and governance are top of mind when it comes to the digital twin. We know however that there are a number of challenges, with much of what is hindering digital twin outcomes overlapping into digital transformation as a whole – digital literacy, digital inclusion and entirely new ways of working. Other challenges include data availability, the trade-offs between operational expenditure waste and upfront capital expenditure, maintaining ethics and data privacy. Furthermore, going back to its origins in manufacturing and how spatial models, dynamic data, sensors, archived data, pattern simulations and predictions were layered on, it is evident that to move from this model to the digital twin, there are fundamental issues that have to be solved such as those related to data integration.

With data now as much a critical component of our infrastructure as bricks and mortar, data about our infrastructure assets needs to be shared in a way that opens up the benefits yet maintains appropriate levels of privacy and security. Our culture must change from one of closed, siloed thinking to an open, transparent culture of effective data management. We need data leadership encompassing purpose, privacy, security, ethics, and governance. Keeping in mind that any investment in the digital twin should be systems based, purpose-driven and outcome focused.

Looking ahead, what can we learn from climate change? In the coming years, we will need to collectively report on progress made. We need to consider what information we need to source and gather now – not only for those in power, but for the public and their decision making, too.

The Australian Environmental Health (AusEnHealth) Strategic Planning Digital Twin, involving Council

The Digital Twin as a Capability

The Connected Digital Twin – Centre for Digital Built Britain

member FrontierSI, aims to enable the ability for policymakers, health managers and researchers to identify vulnerable populations, predict future disease burdens and plan for a changing climate in a coordinated and timely manner. The solution? To develop a platform that works for government, industry and universities to contribute to an ecosystem of integrated digital twins. Challenges have included imputation and patchy data, availability across states as not all data is recorded at the same temporal/spatial resolution and, finally, analysis and the extraction of value. For the National Digital Twin for Flood Resilience project, involving the University of Canterbury, information on floor levels is crucial but isn’t always available. The learning, however, is the need for standards.

The Australia New Zealand Digital Twin Blueprint

‘Digital twins, for all’: the council strongly believes this is a data activation opportunity for every government, every agency, every sector and every discipline. It provides a series of draft recommendations based on engagement with government, industry and academia relating to digital twin capability development, leadership and governance, standards, use cases and research priorities. Think digital by default, and digital twin as one of the approaches we need to advance. The blueprint, created to influence action and investment in digital twins within the built and natural environment in both Australia and New Zealand includes a recommendation that Standards Australia and Standards New Zealand develop respective national Digital Twin Standards Roadmap for their nations.

If we look at digital twin research and what that may look like in 2024, and then 2030, words like multidisciplinary, AI-built 3D modeling, real-world applications, collaborative learning, and standards harmonisation pop up.

In 2021 the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission released He Tūāpapa ki te Ora, Infrastructure for a Better Future, setting out the approach that New Zealand is taking to develop its Infrastructure Strategy. The commission identified areas where action is needed to achieve the 2050 vision – that infrastructure lays the foundation for the people, places and businesses of Aotearoa New Zealand to thrive for generations – and provides options to achieve that vision. As part of the consultation document, the government wants to accelerate investigations on the use of digital twins and prepare for a nationwide digital twin. More recently, the commission has set out a roadmap for the next 30 years which includes embedding digital twins in our planning processes.

The Challenge

Increasingly, across Australia and New Zealand, the value of data in helping deliver more sustainable infrastructure, providing the best community services, promoting economic development and repairing our critical ecosystem services is becoming more evident, and what we now urgently require are the standards, templates, tools and guidance documents to realise this opportunity. The Digital Twin Challenge will help deliver this. As the challenge progresses, the Smart Cities Council is sharing insights and updates, as well as encouraging

wider engagement and input, at the Digital Twin Hub.

Through the challenge participating cohort members, representing public, private and research sectors, with interests spanning natural resource conservation, economic development, construction and asset operation, public health and wellbeing and education, are advancing a series of projects to help show what is possible with digital twin capability, and how it enables the activation of data in a way that supports decision makers.

The Digital Twin Challenge includes a programme of activities that will ultimately benefit the broader marketplace with the projects ranging from strategy, data framework and project-level action plans, to landscape-based digital twins, GIS and IoT capability templates, organisation-wide education modules as well as urban planning and design use cases. Shaped in response to over 18 months of industry engagement, and an open call for expressions of interest, the resulting knowledge resources will be released to the market as the programme promotes digital twin leadership nationally and globally.

What about the digital twin ‘elephant in the room’? Moreover, which elephant is trumpeting loudest? Is it communicating the value of digital twin, the ‘cost’ question, or is the key to focus on enabling collaboration? What is that critical issue we are yet to address? Is it security, collaboration versus competition, or something else? How do we get going? How do we cultivate an environment for successful cross-governmental and industry collaboration whilst ensuring we have frameworks and procurement views to benefit all stakeholders? If we look at legislation and frameworks, while there are currently component parts, there is a need for cohesive, strategic, all-encompassing policy.

The 2022 Aotearoa New Zealand Digital Twin Summit

The annual summit will be held in Wellington on July 7, and, in October, in Melbourne, the Smart Cities Council will also be hosting Digital Twin Week 2022. These two major initiatives will address the above and much more as the Smart Cities Council looks to continue to support the advancement of digital twins within our cities, towns and regions, because we all want the same thing – modern, meaningful tools that value data, allowing us to generate insights to deliver better outcomes. •