Chalmers to host the national competence center Digital Twin Cities
Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova has granted a total investment of 100 million SEK to create new possibilities for virtual urban planning and analysis. Together with Chalmers’ department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, VirtualCity@Chalmers has steered and coordinated the application process and will be a central part of the center.
Center director Anders Logg says: ”We now have the opportunity to complete and scale up our pilot project VirtualCity@Chalmers, which will constitute an important building block for the development of our center. At the same time, we will now be able to utilize in a whole new way the strong expertise available at Chalmers in modelling, simulation and visualization of cities, by combining our expertise in architecture, technology, mathematics and computer science, with experience and current challenges from our partners.”
The Digital Twins concept has emerged as one of the most valuable technologies in recent years, especially in the manufacturing industry where it is used to continuously improve design and innovation of products. Digital twins in the planning, design and construction of cities today remain at visual representation level. The Digital Twin Cities Centre will extend the digital twin concept for cities, to go beyond visualization and make fully integrated data accessible to all stages of urban development. This will be based on interdisciplinary research in architecture, engineering, construction management, data management and integration, mathematical modelling, simulation, visualization and optimization.
The broad consortium of 28 Swedish and international stakeholders shows the enormous potential to boost innovation across the entire value chain, ensuring common ground for further development of cities as liveable, sustainable and inclusive communities. Cutting-edge research will be conducted in 8 different research areas, covering all aspects needed to develop the large-scale digital twin technology, and to harvest the opportunities it brings in new approaches to urban planning & design, architecture and digital construction. To facilitate uptake and implementation for Sweden to spearhead the necessary digitalization of the built environment sector, a particular focus will be on knowledge transfer to industry and public actors. The team around VirtualCity@Chalmers will support the development of the Digital Twin Platform, which will serve as an open and scalable system of databases, software, processes and expertise that together support the activities of Digital Twin Cities.
The interdisciplinary research of the center will be organized around eight main research activities. The center will connect to the public partners as well as available standards and existing initiatives through the Digital Twin Platform.
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