Reducing the Carbon Footprint, One Digital Twin at a Time

According to company materials from Cityzenith, 70% of the world’s carbon emissions come from cities, and digital twin technology may hold the key to reversing this.

 Lamina Tower, Saudi Arabia

A recent Markets & Markets report estimated the Digital Twin market would grow from $3.1 billion in 2020 to $48.2 billion per year by 2026, at an annual CAGR of 58%. Digital Twin software is already revolutionizing industries such as Construction, Energy, Architecture, Aerospace, and Automotive & Transportation.

Furthermore, the global Smart Infrastructure market is forecast to grow to $56b over the next four years, an annual growth rate of 19.5%, according to Market Research Explore.  The report for the global Smart Infrastructure market named Cityzenith, Siemens, and Black & Veatch, as the leading companies in the sector.

Cityzenith just landed a large project in Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea. The Lamina Tower is under construction at the Jeddah Corniche resort on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia, and with premium 10,000 ft² units revealing unobstructed views of the Red Sea from all rooms. It is billed to be one of the most luxurious residential properties in the country.

Cityzenith’s contract with the Lamina Tower makes it the first of its type in the Middle East to use a Digital Twin to optimize and enhance marketing and sales, daily operations, and the overall tenant experience.

Cityzenith’s AI technology platform specializes in energy resilience and has recently launched an international campaign to help cities become climate-friendly under the banner of its Clean Cities – Clean Future campaign.   Cityzenith will donate its SmartWorldPro2 solution to up to 100 cities over the next three years to help them become carbon neutral.

In a conversation with Cityzenith CEO Michael Jansen, he remarked that cities product more than 70% of greenhouse gases and that the use of data and artificial intelligence could reduce this footprint dramatically.

“Our traditional technology is a desktop application used by largely professionals, architects, engineers, planners, facilities managers, building managers, etc.,” says Jansen. “This engagement has a couple other technologies delivered, one ,a kind of lightweight version of our software that will be used embedded in the customers’ website and used as a kind of virtual tour with data of virtual tour plus for perspective buyers . Then there’s an application which I’m excited about because it will get information from the digital twin into the hands of tenants and residents and allow them to actually control things happening in their units.”

In terms of being complementary with other digital twin technologies on the market, Jansen says, “I would argue that there aren’t many digital twin technologies – what we see out there is  not what we consider digital twin technology but rather repurposed BIM, CAD or GIS technology which is fundamentally different. Different software architecture, different purpose, different attitude, different client. So what we see is the repurposing of legacy technology with kind of a repackaging as digital twin technology which isn’t. it may do some aspect of what a digital twin truly can do but generally they are kind of purpose built, bespoke and project specific.  So in fact we see more digital twin services out there than true digital twins technologies emerging.”

What you define as digital twin products?

“There’s a difference in the intention of a digital twin vs. the intention of a BIM model or a GIS software or CAD software,” says Jansen. These are mostly design and modeling tools, they are different categories of tools, they tend to be uniquely adept at handling the complexity of the needs of parametrically modeling individual buildings and maintaining or developing databases of construction materials or other things that can be optimized as the model evolves, which is the purpose of BIM. Digital twinning is really all about gaming and data sites and procedural modeling. Digital twinning is about how to take data and to visualize it, and to aggregate and visualize it at scale so as to arrive at analysis and scale rapidly, responsively or for the entire lifecycle of an asset. And to do that in a massively collaboratively and open way. Digital twin technology tends to lean on gaming technology rather than the core underlying BIM and GIS architecture. They tend to be more much more intensive. Like our company, system integrators are artificial intelligence experts, computer scientists rather than procedural modelers. It’s what happens with data.”

A lot of data is placed under the digital twin umbrella. “Everything is under the digital twin spectrum somewhere,” says Jansen.  “BIM models, GIS layers, Lidar, hundreds and hundreds of common data formats that are regularly and commonly integrated into digital twin projects. And not necessarily for the same purpose. So I don’t think digital twins will get rid  of all these technologies. I think what will happen is that they will extend some of them,  and some will eventually go away. Some of the less robust tools will go away, but that is a long time coming. I think in the next five-ten years it will be about aggregation, consolidation and collaboration. Digital twin does represent a fundamental threat to a lot of existing technologies including GIS because GIS is predicated on a 50 year old model that is a licensing model that is very easily disruptable. We see service providers providing these transformational technologies that any smart Facebook digital twin provider create to take the market out in the next 5-10 years. I think we will see a lot of upheaval in the big project technology market in the next 5-10 years.”

Large providers have characteristically not wanted to change. The hope is this technology will get rid of a lot of the chaos, says Jansen, give access to better choices, and ultimately better results.

Cityzenith is working with the U.S. Military and two NASA programs. Their projects take risks and they want to push their technology to the edge.

“Digital twins derive the greatest value when there is more complexity (why bigger projects),” says Jansen. “Large projects have all the complexity.  You’re not tracking pedestrian foot flow for your house with a digital twin. It won’t require that level of granularity, there are many apps that do that really well. The places that benefit are cities, airports, large scale infrastructure with hundreds of datasets because it’s a data format, with a large data picture.”

He notes that 90% of world’s infrastructure projects are behind schedule and over budget.

“We just assume every large infrastructure project in the world should naturally be behind schedule and overbudget because we allow it. That’s why digital twins are solving these bigger problems first.”

Digital twins are also being used for being able to lower carbon footprints in major cities. “Lower carbon, the challenge of mitigating climate risk actually one of the multiple challenges,” says Jansen. “It’s not just the building. That’s just one thing in the building, collaboration, visibility information, I think that’s what digital twins do really well. Climate change requires collaboration and solutions.

Through an integrated digital twin environment, how will the world deal with all the different software?

“There is too much attention going into materials and products and not enough going into data,” says Jansen. “What we do differently is no product aggregates data into our SimCity like environment at all. There isn’t any comparable product like, algorithms and AI that drive various types of outcome from analytics to predictive analytics. On one major project, the client was using Smartworld to aggregate data from 17 different architects from all over, responsible for developing one district. The chief minister wants a microclimate simulation to demonstrate that these schemes will help reduce the street temperature by 8 degrees during summer. We integrated with a microclimate simulation tool provided by a Canadian company. Architects were able to use our solution to introduce their various BIM, GIS other 3D modeling formats to this common framework, run some analysis then solve these problems. These things can’t be done in Esri or Revit. We’re able to do this uniquely at scale.

“You might use Autodesk for buildings, but you might use us for multi-building projects:  universities, airports, downtown urban core, smart districts a smart cities. We rarely do a single building.”

Tags: 3D, 3D cities, AEC, architects, architecture, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, collaboration, construction, digital twin, Open BIM, reality capture, visualization

Categories: 2D, 3D, 3DExperience FORUM, AEC, AEC training, AECCafe, apps, architecture, BIM, building information modeling, civil information modeling, construction, construction project management, engineering, field solutions, file sharing, greenhouse gas emissions, IES, IFC, infrastructure, lidar, openBIM, project management, simulation, site planning, sustainable design, visualization

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