Local Digital Twins for Cities and Regions: The Way Forward

Abstract

Local Digital Twins (LDTs) appear as a novel approach within the fourth industrial revolution for advancing governance and citizen participation, exploring new ways and providing new opportunities in sensing data, understanding complex phenomena and forecasting the future. The idea of LDTs, that is the application of digital twin technology in a municipality, region or even country level, promises new services and digital means for citizens, in an effort to tackle most of the problems and provide new services to all aspects of life. Within this context, the present chapter analyses the notion, the possibilities, and the state-of-the-art applications of the LDT concept, and then focuses on the possible future developments of this novel technical and societal approach. In this direction, the chapter presents what can be achieved through the convolution of LDTs with breakthrough developments in emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things (IoT), which ultimately result in the development of new applications and services for the intelligent city and the region of tomorrow.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Citizen science, Digital governance, Digital twins, Internet of things, Local digital twins, Smart cities