City Digital Twin Concepts: A Vision for Community Participation
Fathima Nishara Abdeen, Samad M. E. Sepasgozar
Abstract
Community participation is seen as a means of improving the effectiveness of planning to benefit the people by empowering the people. However, a novel approach to enable community participation during the planning stage of smart city infrastructure projects is lacking. Hence, the study presents an approach through the Smart City Digital Twin (SCDT) to support community participation during the planning stage of smart city infrastructure provision. The proposed system architecture comprises five key layers, namely: (a) an acquisition layer, (b) a transmission layer, (c) a digital modeling and data complementary layer, (d) a data/model integration layer, and (e) an application layer. The components of the architecture allow the SCDT to automatically re-create and predict the appearance of infrastructure after community feedback. Volunteered geographic information supported by an agent-based model empowers the process. Unlike other platforms, the architecture of the SCDT is developed to be open to the public. It can be utilized initially in the planning stage and continue throughout the construction stage of infrastructure development. Further, the SCDT would support urban planners, policymakers, and developers to make decisions by considering public needs, perceptions, attitudes, and interests.