{"675279":{"#nid":"675279","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Defining Smart City Digital Twins","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ETwo of those cities,\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/pingeorgia.org\/all_projects\/columbus-consolidated-govt\/\u0022\u003EColumbus\u003C\/a\u003E and \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/pingeorgia.org\/all_projects\/city-of-warner-robins\/\u0022\u003EWarner Robins\u003C\/a\u003E, Georgia, received the awards for projects that involve digital twins. But what, exactly, is a digital twin? And how can the technology be used to solve community problems?\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWe talked with\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/ce.gatech.edu\/directory\/person\/john-e-taylor\u0022\u003EJohn Taylor\u003C\/a\u003E, the Frederick Law Olmsted Professor and associate chair for graduate programs and research innovation in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/ce.gatech.edu\/directory\/person\/neda-mohammadi\u0022\u003ENeda Mohammadi\u003C\/a\u003E, city infrastructure analytics director in Georgia Tech\u2019s Network Dynamics Lab to get some answers. These are edited highlights from an interview. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EQ: What is a digital twin?\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETaylor: A digital twin is an intelligent, adaptive system that pairs virtual and physical worlds. In community development work, a Smart City Digital Twin (SCDT), like those used in Warner Robins and Columbus, pairs a real city to its digital counterpart to generate data-driven feedback loops of interactions between cities\u2019 three main components: (1) human systems, which includes government, industry, and residents; (2) infrastructure systems, which are physical systems and the services they provide; and (3) technology systems, such as devices, sensors, and data analytics infrastructure.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EQ: They\u2019ve been used in manufacturing for some time. How is that different from a SCDT?\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETaylor: They\u0027re somewhat easier to implement in a manufacturing context, because everything\u0027s under control, under a roof. They model all the different manufacturing machinery and they use that to see when a part might need to be changed, and when they need to do maintenance. And they can play with the system, using real-time running data to see what happens if this piece does wear out. How bad would it be? They could either adjust that piece or adjust that machine or maintain it, whatever it might be, based on the scenario analysis.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EQ: How does that translate to the less controlled environment of a city?\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETaylor: It involves replicating multiple systems. For example, if a tall building is on fire, there will be multiple systems brought into play. First, you can see what\u0027s happening in the city at a basic level. You can see that there\u0027s traffic building up, for example. The next level is, why is it happening? And that\u0027s where it gets a little bit more interesting. Most of the digital twin work that we\u0027ve seen \u2014 that anyone\u0027s doing out in the world \u2014 is to understand why things are happening the way they\u0027re happening. But really, the value starts to unlock the third and fourth levels.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe third level is the \u201cwhat if\u201d scenario. In the context of a city, for example, in Midtown they\u0027ve just installed new traffic signals. Hopefully, someone tested that out in advance. But one \u201cwhat if\u201d analysis could be: We\u0027ve got bad traffic in Midtown. What if we put these traffic signals in the Tech Square area? What effect will that have on the flows in the city? With a digital twin, you can know that before you install the lights. That is one of the big opportunities.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe fourth level is the idea that the infrastructure could start to intervene on behalf of the citizens. And so in the example of the tall building fire, the traffic signals might preemptively allow the fire trucks through. But they could also do other things like make all of the signals around the building red, so no traffic is moving and there\u0027s more space for people to evacuate the building. That would be something we might allow the systems to do for us.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EQ: How is that different from, for example, a project in Valdosta that allows first responder vehicles to change the traffic lights so they can get to an emergency more quickly?\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMohammadi: A digital twin will update itself based on data that keeps coming in. If you think about the interaction with the traffic signal, it doesn\u0027t care about what happened five minutes ago, 10 minutes ago. At that moment, they know that the driver probably has a better situational awareness than the automated system. So they let the driver interfere and put useful inputs into the systems to make a better decision.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe digital twin is accumulating data as it comes because it is based on prediction. The definition of prediction is looking at past data and, based on past experience, predicting what\u0027s likely to happen in the future. We know that time is a moving target. As we move on, things that happened in the past accumulate. There are more things that we know. A digital twin is really at the edge of this moving target.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EQ: Tell us about the river safety project in Columbus, which uses a digital twin to create an alert system to prevent drownings in the Chattahoochee River. The city\u0026nbsp;was recently named a\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/spring.smartcitiesconnect.org\/Smart20Awards\/\u0022\u003ESmart 20 award\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;winner by Smart Cities Connect for the\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/news.gatech.edu\/news\/2024\/02\/20\/protection-drowning-through-ai-enabled-camera-system\u0022\u003ECitizen Safety Digital Twin\u003C\/a\u003E project.\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETaylor: A good project from our perspective involves a complicated enough scenario where multiple sensors are involved. With the river safety project, we had to understand and predict water levels with a water level sensor. We use visual sensing to understand, if people were in the environment when hazardous conditions might begin to occur, whether we could get them out of harm\u0027s way before they get swept away into the water.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWe had to build a digital twin of the entire river basin, so we would know just what the danger is if the water level rises this much. Are the islands that people are standing on before the water level rises going to vanish?\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThat one was particularly interesting to us. If you look at the smart city digital twin work we did first, it was related to energy consumption. We\u0027re increasingly excited about having a more direct effect on people\u0027s lives. This one is stopping people from drowning.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EQ: Tell us about the digital twin you developed for the\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/pingeorgia.org\/all_projects\/city-of-warner-robins\/\u0022\u003EWarner Robins\u2019\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;Citizen Safety Digital Twin for Community Resilience project, which deploys dynamic license plate reader cameras to help deter crime. It received the Intelligent Community Forum\u2019s\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.intelligentcommunity.org\/smart21\u0022\u003ESmart21 Community Award\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;at the\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/en.smartcity.org.tw\/index.php\/en-us\/\u0022\u003E2024 Taipei Smart City Summit and Expo\u003C\/a\u003E.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETaylor: This project is pretty complicated from our perspective, because we had to build a geographic information systems (GIS) map of the city. We also have to know where crimes have been occurring. We\u0027ve got more than 10 years of crime data, including very recent crime data. We\u0027re deploying sensors in part to deter crimes, but also to detect and collect more information about crime patterns. It comes down to taking the information about where crimes are occurring and coupling that with predictions about routes people would take if they did commit a crime, so that the car would come into view of one of the cameras. We don\u0027t hide the camera; we put it on a very visible structure, where we predict most likely the crimes are going to occur this week. We put this very visible thing to discourage people from doing anything once they realize they\u0027re being watched. And we found that it did in fact, reduce crimes in those high-crime spots by 20%.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EQ: What are some other ways communities can use digital twins?\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETaylor: We published something this spring, and we\u0027re working on a funding proposal now, about how ambulances move around during a period of inundation \u2014 coastal flooding, coastal inundation, or heavy rains. We\u2019ve met with Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah about this. We looked at data in Virginia Beach to see if, in real time as the flooding is changing, we could deploy ambulances in different parts of the city ahead of where they\u0027re needed. It\u2019s ambulance routing during a natural disaster event.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EQ: Are there limitations to smart city digital twin technology?\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETaylor: When we travel around and we present this, some clever student or faculty member will say, \u201cWouldn\u0027t a great research project be to figure out how to build a central platform for the collection of this data or a standard format for the way this data should be sent so that all the systems can talk to each other?\u201d And they\u2019re right. It\u0027s difficult to get the value across a whole city if you\u0027re only looking at one system at a time. A future research topic is figuring out those data flows and the centralization of that data.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":"","format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EIn March, three communities that are part of the\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/pingeorgia.org\/\u0022\u003EPartnership for Inclusive Innovation\u2019s\u003C\/a\u003E (Partnership) Community Research Grant program were honored with\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/innovate.gatech.edu\/partnership-for-inclusive-innovation-smart-cities-projects-receive-international-recognitions\/\u0022\u003Einternational smart cities awards\u003C\/a\u003E.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"A Q\u0026A with two Georgia Tech experts in civil and environmental engineering and city infrastructure analytics."}],"uid":"36300","created_gmt":"2024-07-01 13:59:28","changed_gmt":"2024-12-09 17:36:57","author":"Karen Kirkpatrick","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2024-07-01T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2024-07-01T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"674273":{"id":"674273","type":"image","title":"Neda_John copy.jpg","body":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/ce.gatech.edu\/directory\/person\/neda-mohammadi\u0022\u003ENeda Mohammadi\u003C\/a\u003E, city infrastructure analytics director in Georgia Tech\u2019s Network Dynamics Lab, and \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/ce.gatech.edu\/directory\/person\/john-e-taylor\u0022\u003EJohn Taylor\u003C\/a\u003E, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (file photo)\u003C\/p\u003E","created":"1719842474","gmt_created":"2024-07-01 14:01:14","changed":"1719842474","gmt_changed":"2024-07-01 14:01:14","alt":"Photo of two Georgia Tech professors","file":{"fid":"257768","name":"Neda_John copy.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/2024\/07\/01\/Neda_John%20copy.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/2024\/07\/01\/Neda_John%20copy.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":291243,"path_740":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/2024\/07\/01\/Neda_John%20copy.jpg?itok=VssFtCKt"}}},"media_ids":["674273"],"groups":[{"id":"1214","name":"News Room"},{"id":"1188","name":"Research Horizons"}],"categories":[{"id":"139","name":"Business"},{"id":"131","name":"Economic Development and Policy"},{"id":"135","name":"Research"}],"keywords":[{"id":"193822","name":"John Taylor"},{"id":"193823","name":"Neda Mohammadi"},{"id":"3671","name":"Enterprise Innovation Institute"},{"id":"188705","name":"Partnership for Inclusive Innovation"},{"id":"179230","name":"digital twin"},{"id":"187915","name":"go-researchnews"}],"core_research_areas":[{"id":"193654","name":"Enterprise Innovation Institute"}],"news_room_topics":[{"id":"106361","name":"Business and Economic Development"}],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EKaren Kirkpatrick\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003Ekaren.kirkpatrick@innovate.gatech.edu\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["karen.kirkpatrick@innovate.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}