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City digital twin adoption growing fast but challenges remain
02 March 2022
by Sarah Wray
Annual revenue from municipal digital twins is projected to grow to US$2.5 billion by 2031, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 percent, according to a new global report from Guidehouse Insights.
Common in the engineering and manufacturing sectors, digital twins are increasingly being adopted by cities for a variety of use cases, including reducing emissions from buildings, traffic management, economic development, climate action planning and monitoring, and more.
They can represent streets, buildings, trees, fire hydrants and other assets, and use both live and historical data to enable cities to project how change will affect the urban environment and how assets are performing in real time.
“Due to the ability of digital twins to thoroughly monitor the present and simulate the future and digital twins’ relatively low cost, cities are beginning to make them a standard tool for urban planning and design,” said Grant Samms, research analyst with Guidehouse Insights. “Digital twins are proving useful for decarbonisation and climate resilience efforts because they can guide energy efficiency efforts while modelling the impacts of climate-affected disasters.”
Obstacles
According to Samms, the primary barrier to adoption is expected to be the lack of knowledge of digital twins and their applications among municipal staff, although this is likely to reduce as examples grow.
There are also challenges surrounding insufficiently digitised municipal data and ensuring that data from a wide array of Internet of Things (IoT) devices owned by varying municipal departments is made available for digital twin use.
Recent examples of city digital twins include Las Vegas, Transport for London and Mannheim.
ABI Research expects more than 500 urban digital twins to be deployed by 2025, and forecasts they will save city planners US$280 billion by 2030.
