Digital Twin Building Blocks for Designing A Generic City-Wide Data Exchange Platform

Digital Twin (DT) technology has become a critical component of smart city evolution, providing real-time analytics, predictive modelling, and operational efficiency enhancements. The goal of this paper is to explore the opportunities and barriers for a city-wide data exchange platform to establish the principles for a Federated DT (FDT) development to serve the integration of sector-specific DT applications to create a cohesive urban intelligence framework. The paper investigates the topic of federated data exchange in a smart city context and how interoperability among the use cases of DTs can be achieved. Two system architectures for a Data Exchange Platform have been explored, including layered and composable FDT approaches. The composable architecture has been chosen for the platform implementation to ensure interoperability, scalability, and security in real-time data exchange. The composable architecture is essentially a microservices-driven framework with self-contained components that have clear functionalities and provides the greatest flexibility for future development of the FDT Data Exchange Platform. By employing a range of microservices, the composable architecture can ensure modularity, scalability, and flexibility, making it easier to manage, update, and extend the platform to accommodate additional DTs for evolving city needs, urban management and decision-making. However, this comes at the cost of increased issues around security and governance of interfaces. The platform has been tested by 5 DTs designed by 4 Universities located in Birmingham, UK and Ulsan, South Korea. For the design of the platform, nine common elements have been identified as “building blocks” analysing the DT use cases in a sandbox environment called the Diatomic Azure DT Development Platform. These common building blocks are 3D Visualisation, Asset Management, Predictive Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Authorisation Methods, Access Control, API, and Sensors. These building blocks have been later validated by the use cases presented by 8 SMEs developing DTs. The initial results confirm that the identified building blocks are sufficient for the development of DTs to create a generic city-wide data exchange platform. These results provide insights for DT adoption by de-risking investment and targeted resources required for smart city development. The scope of this paper is limited with smart city applications but the proposed FDT system architecture should be applicable to any domain.