Digital twins have become an important means of offering actionable insight into our world. The existing and potential applications are extremely broad in scope and drive a need for rapid creation of large scale digital replications of the real world.
We organize our digital twin application around four conceptual categories or “layers”: Physical, Human, Resource and Cognitive. The Physical layer represents the world “as-built” and can include imagery, terrain and 3D models. The Human layer includes the population and their location, either through simulated pattern of life or real time geolocation feeds. The Cognitive layer encapsulates human awareness, behaviour, decision making, social connections and communication. The Resource layer contains the assets available for planning and simulation.
This paper reports on the design, implementation and integration of the geospatial data used to create the Physical and Human layers of one such digital twin, the city of London. Our project made extensive use of both cloud technology and open standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). We faced multiple challenges related to: (i) the conversion of large amounts of photogrammetry data for streaming using the OGC 3DTiles standard (ii) the sourcing and processing of sufficiently detailed data for pattern of life and power network simulations and (iii) the performance challenges associated with using OGC WMS/WFS for real-time simulation.
Viewed individually, none of the challenges we faced are unique in the geospatial and simulation communities. However, we believe the intersection of the two domains and the lessons learned from our requirement to integrate data across the four “layers” may provide insight to others planning their own urban digital twins.
Keywords
CLOUD COMPUTING,GEOSPATIAL DATA ,INTEGRATION,PATTERN OF LIFE
Additional Keywords