AI-Driven Digital Twins for Smart Cities and Spatial Governance

A special issue of Geomatics (ISSN 2673-7418).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 May 2027 | Viewed by 95

Editors

School of Built Environment, UNSW Sydney Kensington, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Interests: urban informatics, urban digital twins; LLM apps; agentic AI; generative AI; visual analytics
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Guest Editor
1. Department of Software Engineering, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria
2. GATE Institute, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria
Interests: urban digital twins; data interoperability and semantic enrichment; data-intensive systems; generative AI for urban planning
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Guest Editor Assistant
Faculty of Geodesy, University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy, Sofia, Bulgaria
Interests: GIS; UAV

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming an essential component of digital twins for smart cities and spatial governance. However, the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-driven digital twins fundamentally depend on the quality, consistency, interoperability, and uncertainty of the underlying geospatial data. While significant progress has been made in AI algorithms, comparatively less attention has been devoted to understanding how spatial data quality influences model performance, robustness, reproducibility, and decision-making.

This Special Issue aims to provide a geomatics-oriented perspective on AI-driven digital twins by focusing on the interaction between geographical data and AI systems. We welcome original research that investigates how data quality, spatial resolution, positional accuracy, semantic consistency, data fusion, interoperability, and uncertainty propagation affect AI-enabled digital twins and spatial intelligence. Contributions covering methodological developments, benchmarking frameworks, sensitivity analysis, quality assessment, and real-world case studies are particularly encouraged.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Sensitivity of AI models to geospatial data quality and uncertainty
  • Benchmarking AI-driven digital twins using heterogeneous spatial datasets
  • Effects of spatial resolution, scale, and positional accuracy on AI performance
  • Data interoperability, semantic harmonization, and standardization for digital twins
  • Multi-source geospatial data fusion for AI-enabled urban systems
  • Data quality assessment and validation for GeoAI applications
  • Explainable, trustworthy, and reproducible AI for geomatics
  • Geospatial foundation models and AI methods robust to imperfect spatial data
  • AI-enabled digital twins for urban planning, infrastructure monitoring, environmental management, and disaster resilience

By emphasizing the relationship between geomatics data quality and AI performance, this Special Issue seeks to advance the methodological foundations of trustworthy, interoperable, and scalable digital twins for next-generation spatial governance.

Dr. Haowen Xu
Prof. Dr. Dessislava Petrova-Antonova
Guest Editors

Dr. Christina Mikrenska
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • AI-driven digital twins
  • smart cities
  • spatial governance
  • 3D/4D geospatial modeling
  • geomatics
  • urban informatics
  • spatial data infrastructures
  • geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI)
  • spatial standards

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Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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