City Digital Twin Potentials: A Review and Research Agenda

Abstract

The city digital twin is anticipated to accurately reflect and affect the city’s functions and processes to enhance its realization, operability, and management. Although research on the city digital twin is still in its infancy, the advancement of the digital twin technology is growing fast and providing viable contributions to augmenting smart city developments. This study reviews the literature to identify the current and prospective potentials and challenges of digital twin cities. A research agenda is also proposed to guide future research on the city digital twincity digital twin to reach the utmost level of a comprehensive and complete city digital twin. Enhancing the efficiency of data processing, promoting the inclusion of socio-economic components of the city, and developing mutual integration between the two counterparts of the digital twin are proposed to be the future research directions to achieve and utilize a completely mirrored city digital twin.