Digital twin in epidemic: How does a smart city cope with novel challenges through digital simulation, automation and visualisation

This item is part of: Boarin, P., Haarhoff, E., Manfredini, M., Mohammadzadeh, M., Premier, A., (2021). Rethinking Sustainable Pacific Rim Territories. Proceedings of the 2020 APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub PhD Symposium, Future Cities Research Hub, School of Architecture and Planning of the University of Auckland. ISBN: 978-0-473-53616-9

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the 21st century, as rapid urbanization becomes a global phenomenon, smart city becoming more and more a future-proof solution for cities with rising unprecedented challenges of congested infrastructure, population density, energy inefficiency and global public health. In this context, digital twin was initially introduced by Dr Michael Grieves in 2002 as a key enabler technology to improve product manufacture and complex systems, and later bloomed as a new concept to promote better design, system integration and troubleshooting of the physical city through simulation, automation and visualisation. This paper, in aiming to understand how digital twin was rapidly adopted by a number of pioneer entrepreneurs, cities and nations, provides a narrative and categorical perspective of digital twin appearance in literature and explores the extents where a real-time cyber presentation of the city can support mediating urban issues within the context of global pandemic. In result, a longitudinal section of digital twin and smart city development has been introduced, including the evolvement of digital model, digital shadows to digital twin, as well as the rising interest of academia and private sector to the technology.