Digital Twins: The New Frontier for Smart Cities
- By Han Chon, Nutanix
- June 05, 2023
21st-century Singapore always saw its future as a smart city. COVID-19 broke the link between the office and work, putting the days where floods of commuters shuttled in and out of the major business hub behind us. New macroeconomic conditions prompted governments and business leaders worldwide to invest in planning and developing modern cities that reimagine our lives and work.
But transforming a bustling, often congested, city into a smart one is almost the same as rebuilding a house after its foundations have been laid. A complete teardown is needed to overhaul the home even though the structure is already present. Intense planning and close monitoring are paramount.
While urban planners and governments have been collecting big-picture data for planning in transportation and zoning for some time, a new wave of technology is encouraging the capture of even more granular data.
Measuring everything from noise pollution and canopy cover to wastewater volume, the era of data-led intelligence is changing how we build and rebuild cities. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to smart city planning – every urbanscape is vastly different regarding citizen requirements, infrastructure, and technology maturity levels. While governments can take inspiration from their national or global counterparts, the overall quality of urban spaces relies on rich, local insight.
Digital Twinfrastructure
Digital twins can help urban planners solve a city's specific problems by enabling teams to mimic their localities' environment on a screen. Users can visualize how proposed designs impact everything in the real world, even simulating future changes such as population growth.
City planners are given the tools to test whether a solution will work before a single jackhammer hits the road.
The vibrant city of Barcelona is doing just this. Barcelona is executing its plan to become the first 15-minute city using a digital twin version of itself.
Initially developed by Professor Carlos Moreno, the 15-minute city concept ensures all essential needs—groceries, medical care, public transport stops, schools, leisure, and cultural spots—are accessible within 15 minutes or less on foot or by bike from home.
With people's workspaces no longer concentrated in a single area, the idea has never been more applicable.
Back here at home, authorities in Singapore developed a dynamic three-dimensional (3D) city model and collaborative data platform – Virtual Singapore. Virtual Singapore is a topographical digital map used by the public and private sectors. It enables users to develop sophisticated tools and applications for test-bedding concepts and services, such as simulating crowd dispersion to establish evacuation procedures during emergencies or employing semantics to predict the impact of flooding.
Smart cities like these present a more connected, efficient vision for the future – they use technology and data in ways that enable them to be cleaner, more sustainable and offer various automated public services.
Bytes over Bricks
The global smart cities market is expected to exceed US$2.5 trillion as early as 2025 – more than double the estimated US$1 trillion in 2020. In Singapore, more than nine smart nation initiatives will continue to position Singapore as one of the world's top "smart cities."
As the world moves in this direction, far more work will be needed for cities still running on legacy systems designed for paper-based bureaucracy.
The World Economic Forum notes that smart cities must be built in a way that acknowledges the inevitable obsolescence of current-day technologies; they must be constantly evolving and innovating and always prepared for future disruption and change. Hybrid multicloud strategies, therefore, are the ideal infrastructure model to support smart cities as they offer flexibility and freedom of choice to shift workloads, applications, and data as needs change.
In Singapore, the government has included a new KPI in the Digital Government Blueprint (DGB) to put at least 70 percent of eligible government systems on the commercial cloud by 2023. The move aims to support Singapore's ambition to have digital options for its government services.
In another example, Sapporo City created the first hybrid multicloud environment used by a local government in Japan, enabling engineers to put workloads in the cloud environments that made the most sense, freeing resources to focus on sustainable urban development with data at the epicenter.
This flexibility gained with hybrid multicloud is critical because data is the prime currency in a smart city's success—it makes cities smart. Still, it has to first be captured from the thousands of sensors and devices, then collected and stored securely before it is analyzed.
As demonstrated by the Singapore government's various programs and updated KPIs, the smart city initiative remains a crucial national focus. There are untold benefits from smart city and digital twin strategies. But first, the city's digital backbone must be capable of automating the data collection process, securing what's collected, and powerful enough to run the necessary analysis.
IT infrastructure from the 20th century has little to no hope of delivering what’s required in the 21st.
Han Chon, managing director for ASEAN at Nutanix wrote this article.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/I'm love photography and art. This is me.