Urban Strategy: Digital Twins & AI for Livable and Resilient Cities

Urbanization, in combination with transitions in mobility and energy, causes big and urgent challenges. Cities must facilitate growth (housing challenge), safeguard wellbeing and resilience. Sustainable Urban Mobility plays a pivotal role in city planning. Digital Twins are gaining popularity in cities to help to gain insight and make well informed decisions.

In this lecture, Jeroen Borst will explain TNO’s Urban Strategy to build Predictive Digital Twins of cities. A technology overview provides insight in how the software components are developed along with an architecture to allow interactive assessment of scenarios in a holistic way.

An overview of models provides insight in how science in different domains is being made applicable for interactive usage. Zooming in on one of the models will lead to insight in the challenges of city-wide interactive modelling.

With examples in Amsterdam, Singapore, Curacao and Antwerp, the practical applicability as well as the implementation of Predictive Digital Twins, with a focus on sustainable urban mobility, are demonstrated.

Next step of working with Digital Twins to move from prediction to optimization. TNO will share a vision on how decision-making processes could benefit how from Digital Twin in combination with (generative) AI.

Jeroen Borst, M.Sc., is Cluster Manager Societal Impact for Accessibility and Livability and heads the TNO proposition on “Livable and Resilient Cities” in the unit Mobility and Built Environment of TNO: Netherlands Organization for Applied Research. Under his supervision, TNO developed Urban Strategy, a digital city twin platform to manage urban planning, mobility planning, energy, and environmental impact. With the ambition to make the complexity of urban planning manageable for all stakeholders, the Urban Strategy team combined domain knowledge of the different fields, with state-of-the-art enabling technologies such as HPC and distributed data and AI.

With Urban Strategy, TNO and partners help cities to get real-time insight in the effects of urban developments and the impact of new mobility concepts on accessibility, air quality, noise, and livability. Urban Strategy has since been applied in cities including Amsterdam, Singapore, Curacao, Beijing, and New Delhi.