Digital Twinning for Urban and Rural Environmental Modelling
The faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), in collaboration with the faculty of Engineering Technology (ET) is bringing together multidisciplinary expertise from a wide range of researchers and academics. The focus is on collaboration and interdisciplinary research aiming at developing solutions that can address global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, and pollution, among others.
The concept of a digital twin (DT) was introduced initially in the manufacturing industry, where it refers to a digital model of a product. In this domain, the University of Twente is proud to have mounted the Smart Industry Lab in which digital twinning research for industrial objectives is carried out. Please have a look here for more information on this Lab. In recent years, it has been used in the geospatial domain, referring to a digital replica of physical reality. DT has been seen as a digital replica of the physical living environments that supports decision-making through the seamless integration of a myriad of data and analytics techniques. As such, DT is not a mere geometric (2D and 3D) representation of static assets but a dynamic/live model that represents their past, current, and future states. With that definition in mind, a wide area of research encompassing living environmental modelling, Building Information Modelling (BIM), Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), and Urban Decision Support Systems is explored and integrated.
Vision
One of the main goals of this community is to establish a digital-twin-based decision-making ecosystems. This would allow academics, practitioners, and decision-makers to harness the power of DT in collecting, organizing, and analysing heterogeneous data in a single platform to work toward sustainable and resilient cities.
Mission
- To use the collaborative hub for research and joint projects to develop and implement the digital twin concepts for planning, design, construction, and maintenance of sustainable and smart cities.
- To show how DT's can be produced according to cutting-edge technological developments and how they can be applied in practice
- To facilitate the exchange of information and experience by organizing workshops and seminars
- To become nationally and internationally a strong contributor to the research on digital twins