Digital Twins for Urban Spaces: Keeping Urban Twins Updated Using Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

Due to increased availability of digital data and information, as well as increased availability of computing power, digital twins have become a powerful tool to understand, plan, simulate and predict in a digital environment instead of building real-world prototypes. Digital twinning saves resources and enables manifold experiments before going into production in an industrial environment. The idea of digital twins has been adapted to urban environments. Digital urban twins form the digital representation of real-world objects, processes, networks and stakeholders. They enable an urban society, governments and other decision-makers to better understand complex urban settings. Data from different sources are combined and analyzed to obtain a more complete picture. Especially under the aspect of climate change, urban regions are under immense pressure since more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. Digital urban twins allow simulation and prediction to extract up-to-date, relevant information to support planning and sustainable development.

The quality of a digital urban twin depends on the diversity of data and information, and even more on the actuality of its content. The urban context is complex and dynamic. Therefore, updating a digital urban twin has great influence on its usability.

Remote sensing provides multimodal data with high spatial, spectral and temporal resolution. Using different platforms and sensors along with automated processes to interpret and analyze the acquired data could support updating the digital twin. Artificial intelligence and deep learning are means to cope with the incoming big data from all different sources.

The increased amount and variety of remote sensing data play a key role in the generation of urban digital twins by providing observations and measurements that are characterized by an improved spatio-temporal resolution: these data streams keep the digital and physical worlds synchronized, enabling the necessary data-driven analytics. This Special Issue encourages submissions on the role of remote sensing and contributions to all the phases and aspects characterizing the urban digital twin lifecycle, as well as experiences in different application domains. We also welcome articles that explore the implementation challenges and limits in the most relevant domains and applications in engineering and beyond.

In this framework, this Special Issue encourages submissions related to the conceptualization, development, implementation and employment of urban digital twins supporting sustainable and smart cities, with an emphasis on the remote sensing component. Here, topics of interest also include, but are not limited to:

• Use cases of remote sensing in digital urban twins;
• The role of remote sensing in the context of urban twinning;
• Methods of updating urban twins;
• Automated processing of remote sensing data for digital urban twins;
• Remote sensing and data fusion;
• Digital urban twins and climate change adaptation;
• Big data management for digital urban twins.

Dr. Christine Pohl
Dr. Mila Koeva
Prof. Dr. Dessislava Petrova-Antonova
Guest Editors

Name: Benjamin Bleske
Guest Editor Assistant
Address: City of Wuppertal, Division Cadastre, Surveying and Geodata (R102), Johannes-Rau-Platz 1, 42275 Wuppertal, Germany
Email: [email protected]
Webpage: https://cdu-witten.de/person/10/portait.html
Interests: urban digital twins; city administration; planning processes

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• digital urban twin
• 3D city modeling
• simulation modeling
• virtual reality
• satellite observations
• sensors for urban twins
• spatial planning
• artificial intelligence
• visualization
• data fusion
• urban data platforms
• urban resilience
• urban sustainability

Title: Challenges and Opportunities in Creating 3D Urban Digital Twins
Author: Yadav
Highlights: • Concept of 3D Urban Digital Twins (3D UDT) and its differentiation from traditional 3D city models as a system. • Primary purpose and applications of 3D Urban Digital Twins. • Geospatial data sources needed in developing 3D UDTs. • Key challenges faced in the practical implementation of 3D UDTs and further opportunities. • Decision-making processes with 3D Urban Digital Twins.