Urban Digital Twins Contribute Toward the Race to Zero

“What are digital twins and specifically urban twins?” This was the question is posed at the beginning of the webinar by Michael Jansen, founder and CEO of CityZenith in a recent webinar hosted by CityZenith and ABI Research. They are virtual replicas of buildings, infrastructure and physical assets, fully interconnected with the data in and around them. Digital twins can provide actionable insight for optimization in design, engineering, construction and operations through simulation and prediction of future outcomes.

Lamina Tower, Red Sea, Saudi Arabia

CityZenith employs a platform based approach to predict future outcomes. In March 2021, Forbes predicted that “by the year 2025, 500 major world cities will rely on digital twins for daily operations.”

Urban digital twins comprise cities, with data from the built environment, transportation networks, sensor data, government agencies, architects, planners, citizens, universities, using umbrella collaboration platforms.

“One of our first major urban digital twins that was executed for a city from the ground up, involving planners out of Singapore and Foster & Partners, was used to help them plan a district leveraging architectural features, building, landscaping, hardscaping, simulating how architecture and landscaping could be used to lower the temperature of the city in the summer.

The infrastructure project EWRP2 303 Kilo Rail wanted a master digital twin design model using BIM models that could coordinate with all available data in real time, integrate all that data, using i-model (from Bentley) that had one common single map they could pull their models into.

Singapore Land Authority

Orlando SED sought a digital twin to do building systems for downtown, and to connect it to the Amway center. “This is effectively Orlando Live, an entertainment mixed use complex to integrate the stadium with the rest of the city,” said Jansen. “We’re 20 percent through the beginning of integration with different IT systems, visualizing airflow and air quality and integrating across platforms.”

CityZenith participates in both the digital twin market and smart cities. “We continue to grow, and launched Smartworld OS a year ago, with $1-3M revenues predicted as of Q1 2021. The pipeline has grown to $11M since the beginning this year,” Jansen noted.

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.

A new project Agile Fractal Grid plans is rolling out digital twins for their energy services program. This Fractal Grid is high performance smart grid technology for large projects to help energy systems in these projects to optimize and to power massive sections of cities. One of the projects is in Canada, where one of the provinces doing providence wide digital twins.  “For us they are a partner, we do large projects and partner with organizations, where we customize for organization’s use, and we have a platform approach,” said Jansen. “Agile Fractal rallies around the implementation of our technology in major cities and working with green organizations to sell that through to city organizers.

We have a server system component tp help to execute the digital twins. The technology is designed for partners to be able to do everything themselves. Other companies are selling repurposed, CAD,  BIM or other products. We do IoT integrations to take scale and integrate massive amounts of data. You can’t do that with existing tools on the marketplace.”

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 net zero carbon cities campaign through the Digital Twin Consortium.

NASA is exploring digital twins for urban air taxis and delivery routes.

The “Race to Zero,” is a concept that many initiatives rally around. Green Building retrofit is in the hundreds of millions. Infrastructure is 40% of global carbon problem. 75% emissions come from cities and 65% come from buildings.

Clean Cities – Clean Future was designed to implement CityZenith’s digital twin technology in partnership with local green building and other technology initiatives to sell it through to local building owners and help them with smart buildings and renewable resources. “You also have to have incentive-based financial strategies, and green building strategies and engineering strategies for net zero goals,” said Jansen.

Brooklyn Navy Yard, the cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas will be next. “Our goal is to have 10 cities signed up by the end of the year.”

Dominque Bonte, managing director and vice president of ABI Research, said they did one report recently focused on the planning and design use cases of digital twins, and found that it can be used to design urban assets, building and design roads, and for operations and managements, and can be used for assets not built yet.

“What does it mean in terms of costs savings for cities? It’s important to realize the different levels of modeling a digital twin enables,” said Bonte.

Layer 1 – 3D modeling of the built environment – buildings, trees, environment

Layer 2 – physics modeling – heat propagation, streetlights, reducing heat islands in cities, airflow, Covid-19 ventilation, air pollution and how quickly it is spreading, noise, any physics parameter is part of that.

Layer 3 – dynamic modeling – everything that moves, vehicles, congestion, transportation system, crowd management in the wake of Covid-19, airports and other venues outside buildings as well.

You can do virtual prototyping, optimizing the design before it gets built, including evacuation simulation. “You have all parameters including crowds, you can calculate how much time it takes to evacuate buildings,” said Bonte. “One example is virtual testing and once it gets built you will meet evacuation requirements. Energy efficiency is also another key example. Once you optimize a building for energy efficiency and you can optimize and incur cost savings across the entire lifecycle of the building.”

Digital twin-enabled cost savings for city governments are projected to $20 billion by the year 2030, and distributed across various verticals and end markets, energy efficiencies are the second big area of cost savings. Next is resilience – safety and security – design cities in a way that they are resilient by nature which will save them down the way. “We are building models for our forecasts,” said Bonte.

“We are looking at urban populations per region but also looking at what is the budget of the cities spending, averaging budget per million population. To do cost savings you have to know what it is our city is spending today. What is the incremental cost savings digital twins can bring to the table.”

In looking at the urban population, for example, by 2030, 50% of the urban population will live in cities that are manage by digital twins. “That metric is kind of the point of no return that digital twins can become a mainstream way of managing urban assets – a 10-50% cost savings yield with digital twins. Applications such as reducing the impact of flooding when it happens. All that represents cost management when catastrophes are happening.”

Design, utilities, surveillance networks, streetlights, Wi-Fi hotspots, all can be optimized by using digital twins, according to Bonte. “You know all the obstructions to the buildings, you have exact 3D information, you can probably do surveillance with fewer streetlights and surveillance cameras.”

Digital twins can be used for optimizing the interior of buildings for Covid-19 specifications, including, airflow, ventilation, design of windows and doors, maybe indirectly is a huge savings on health care and policing.

It will be awhile before organizations can organize themselves around digital twins, however it will empower everyone from small to large organizations.

“There’s an incredible number of inefficiencies at the government and education level and we can remove those inefficiencies, by teaching people how wide and rich these systems are,” said Bonte. “There’s no limit to what you can do with it. In terms of examples, one of the earliest implementations, was virtual Singapore, they’re very advanced at many levels. They are a  laboratory for smart cities, and very interested in employing digital twins. They are focusing on solar energy maximization, square meterage and footage and also looking at housing design. It’s a very dense environment where they don’t have a lot of room to experiment. They have to do it right the first time. Digital twins work well there. They’re looking into evacuation. Public housing is half finished now. They used windflow and reducing the urban heat island, using IA based software for energy savings, as well as using AI and advanced pipe technology to automate design.”

Paris is also experimenting with energy generation and distribution. Their digital twin trial includes buildings, and the whole energy value chain.

Vancouver is planning to optimize their traffic and mobility environment for their transit system.

Jansen said that CityZenith does custom integrations for almost every project. “We need to understand the specific needs to form a digital twin proposal for a customer. All data can be integrated – the key is that it has a space and time element. Digital twins are being used for the purpose of looking at redensificiation and sustainability for brownfield projects.”

Jansen brought up the “BAM standard”, that it is like a BIM but with HVAC and other information stripped away so that it reveals rooms, floors, façade, people flow, rental analysis, security lines of sight It begins with a 3D model with all your core information digitized.

Tags: 3D, 3D cities, AEC, architects, architecture, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, CityZenith, climate change, collaboration, digital twin, facilities management, generative design, laser scanning, visualization

Categories: 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11, 3D, AEC, AECCafe, apps, architecture, Architecture 2030, BIM, Cloud, collaboration, construction, construction project management, field, field solutions, IES, IFC, Internet of Things, IoT, mixed reality, reality capture, sustainable design, traffic simulation, Year In Infrastructure 2020

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