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The Digital Twin concept is the latest technology dominating the smart city hype cycle. While the technology has already been around for decades in engineering, thanks to more powerful processing and cloud storage, it has now entered the realm of city planning. The main promise of Digital Twins for local administrations is to make better-informed and transparent decisions with the help of data integration and visualisation from across the urban space. The technology also promises to make cities more resilient and – as the platform can also be made available to citizens via public interfaces – more co-creative. But what is a Digital Twin in reality and how does it work? A Digital Twin is, simply speaking, a virtual doppelgänger of the urban environment: buildings, streets, parks, trees, traffic and noise levels – all readily available as data points in a digital model. Some urban planners might shout out that this is nothing new. And indeed, urban planning departments have been using 2D – or even 3D – models and computer-aided design tools and models already for years. So what’s with all the hype about Digital Twins? Real-time Trumps Static Data In essence, it’s the integration of real-time data. GPS data from buses or trams, weather data, water levels of the river that flows through the city centre, the level of air pollution on the main street or even the amount of people that are passing through the main shopping street on a busy Saturday afternoon. Almost everything can be captured by sensors that are already deployed all over town. The Digital Urban Twin is a hub for all this data: it integrates it and makes it usable for city departments and policymakers through real-time visualisations. A playground for city planners, the Digital Twin technology can digitally simulate the impact of almost any changes to the urban fabric. How does traffic change when we turn Street X into a pedestrian area? What happens if we reduce the car lanes on city highway Z and create a bike highway? Would the new metro line have a positive impact on air pollution? Should we create a park or a new parking lot in the area Y? These and many more scenarios are possible. Using cutting-edge technologies such as cloud storage and high-performance computing, a Digital Twin becomes available for any city of any size. In theory, at least. In practice, however, it’s a bit more complicated. Three Key Challenges Towards Digital Twin Adoption at Scale The DUET Digital Urban Twin project has set out to make Digital Twin technology available for cities and towns of all sizes, solving some of the key challenges that are currently still standing in the way to the uptake of Digital Twins on a large scale: 1. The Quest for Data In the first months of the DUET project, we noticed a common denominator across all pilot sites: the quest for suitable data. While discussing scenarios with our pilot regions Athens, Pilsen and Flanders, the main challenge is not to find use cases for the Digital Twin, but where to find the data that is needed to turn the Digital Twin into a useful tool for all regions. Sometimes the data is owned by private companies. Occasionally the federal level holds the data. Often, there is no real-time data available or only from a limited amount of sensors, and at times there is no data at all. What we tend to forget is that many local governments around the globe are still at the beginning of their digital transformation journey. This limits, in particular, the availability of open, real-time, and quality data. While the open data movement has brought about change – especially in cities’ attitudes towards data – many local or regional governments do not have the capacity or are still not seeing themselves as a data broker or integrator. 2. Lack of data standards Once we have found suitable data to feed into our Digital Twin, a new challenge arises: is the data available in a usable format and can it easily be integrated into the data platform of the Digital Twin? Usually, the answer to both questions is no. This is especially critical when a digital tool should scale across cities in different countries. To be able to integrate data and to avoid lock-in through proprietary standards, DUET is applying open standards and is working with OASC Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms to ensure that data is interoperable and the DUET Digital Twin can be applied and scaled across the three pilot regions. 3. Cooperation on all levels In order to make a Digital Urban Twin work locally and turn it into a useful tool for public administrations, cooperation and co-creation is fundamental. For starters, any local administration needs the buy-in and support from their political leaders. Once secured, the innovation departments of a city need to involve their colleagues from the urban planning, mobility, environmental and/or other departments to find out what their expectations towards a Digital Twin are and how their colleagues would use it. Once the main departments are aligned, it is crucial for the success of the Digital Twin to work with your local innovation ecosystem: involve living labs and your start-up and scale-up scene, engage with potential data providers such as public utilities, and work together with local research institutes as well as private or semi-private companies who are operating in your city. Ways Forward: Digital Twins & The Digital Transformation Digital Twins can and will support local administrations to make better-informed decisions. Just as the technology is already successful in the world of engineering, Digital Urban Twins will bring plenty of benefits to urban as well as rural places. If we want our public administrations to make better policy decisions driven by data as set out by the European Data Strategy, projects like DUET and cities committing to sharing solutions are steps in the right direction, but it’s not enough. Cities and communities have to find and shape their role in a new digital world, develop the necessary digital capacities in-house or through meaningful co-operations, and adopt a new collaborative mindset towards data and digital tools across the administration. Cities and communities need to come together in networks like Open & Agile Smart Cities and in movements such as the Join, Boost, Sustain declaration to face the challenges of digital transformation together and find ways to generate societal impact – based on openness and transparency – together. Instead of reinventing the wheel in every local community, sharing and reusing solutions based on open standards, like DUET Digital Urban Twins, will be key to a sustainable and cost-effective digital transformation. By Lea Hemetsberger, DUET's Pilot Coordinator and Project Manager at Open & Agile Smart Cities.

DUET is gaining traction by achieving a more detailed understanding of user’s requirements, whether they be citizens, city employees, policy officials or policy makers, in each of the three pilot regions of Athens, Pilsen and Flanders. A recent output of 11 ‘what if’ scenarios (otherwise known in agile delivery as epics) describes how the DUET Digital Twin processes will support policy making process across the fields of transportation, environment and health. These were created by inviting a representative sample of end users from Athens, Pilsen and Flanders to informally tell their stories, e.g. “As a... , I want to… , with the goal of…” in relation to a given scenario. Their feedback was captured in a simple template to ensure all this rich information was recorded in a consistent format. These collective user insights are now being used to ensure that goals of the project are truly aligned with the needs of the users. The user stories together with a map of all the stakeholders enables the project to identify all the potentially relevant data sources needed for the Digital Twin pilots and estimate their availability. At this stage of the project the pilots need to keep an open mind as to other data opportunities that could be utilitised as the work progresses, as better ways forward may present themselves. Information on data availability is vital in determining the feasibility of the eleven ‘epics’ going forwards. Though much will depend upon the quality of datasets and their updates over the duration of the project. However, having early sight of the overall picture enables the project work to be focused on delivering the best solutions and value to users and stakeholders alike. Where do we go next? Well this work enables the pilot regions to define the actual user cases for their digital twin and at the same time serve as input for the technical team so that they can build relevant technical solution. This collective effort results in the ‘final list of user and technical requirements for the DUET solution’. In order to whittle down to this level of detail, the user stories will need to be further refined so that an informed selection against an agreed number of criteria can be made around on which ‘epics’ to pursue. These decisions will need to weigh up factors such as feasibility versus level of ambition, availability and quality of data, overcoming any potential legal hurdles e.g. ownership, privacy and sharing of data, the level of sponsorship and engagement from key decision makers; as well as eliminating any duplication across the different pilot regions. It’s still early days for DUET, but it is exciting to see the collective learning and synergy across each pilot and indeed each user story, which over time will enable best practices to be shared.

The project's technical team gathered in Athens at the end of January 2020 for a two-day meeting. The goal was to formulate a common technical vision and approach, take stock of the available components, understand what else might be needed to realise the overall project ambition, and foresee any challenges that could hamper progress. DUET technical meeting underway in Athens Much of the discussion centered around DUET's ultimate solution i.e. a digital twin platform. Partners agreed it should be modular and consist of multiple layers. Infrastructure Layer: Corresponds to a cloud-based infrastructure with support for the High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads. Main considerations include Development and production of HPC and cloud environment (one or more servers per environment), with some components running on partner’s server CI/CD with Gitlab for open sourced components (Deployment Templates required). Other tools for proprietary code in partner’s premises Docker with Docker compose or Kubernetes Singularity for HPC components Data Layer: Refers to the repositories/databases of the platform where each database is deployed in a distributed mode that spans multiple nodes in the cloud cluster for enhanced scalability, availability and performance. Two main considerations are Databases: IoT data, Open Data, content from social media and blogs, models, apps and pilot data Possible database servers: MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Neo4j Business Layer: Corresponds to the processing components that implement business requirements of the platform. All components will expose a REST API for consumption by the visualization/UI components. Key considerations include Modelling (Data Modeler, Data Process Engine, Simulation Engine) A.I. (NLP Engine, Sentiment Analysis) Gamification (Gamification Engine) Semantic (Semantic Enricher) Access Control Layer: Responsible for aggregating data from various external sources and exposing a unified API to all Open Linked Data in the repository. The IoT API component facilitates the ingestion of new data pipelines from sensors and other sources. Key services include IoT Gateway API Gateway Message Broker Service Discovery Orchestrator User management Presentation Layer: Provides the interfaces between the systems and the user. This requires Integrated UI Dashboards per role encapsulating the various UI components React JS for implementation D3 and Resium for visualisations Kibana and Grafana for monitoring One of the main takeaways from the meeting is that DUET should act as a data broker relying on Open Data compliant standards e.g. OGC sensorthings. For better performance, caching adapters may be added while random data access from models should be avoided. Since pretty much everything these days is event based, plugins/adapters can facilitate the replay of time series by publishing content to the event broker, as shown in the T-CELL concept below. High-level overview of (DUE)T-CELL Concept Towards the end of the meeting, partners identified and agreed on the components that need to be implemented and/or adapted in the first year of the project. They had a better sense of each other's responsibilities and how the different activities, tasks and outputs align with one another. Importantly, they introduced and agreed on the collaboration procedures to determine key priorities for the first phase, and thrashed out a detailed plan for the next six months. To keep abreast of future technical and other developments, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and follow DUET on Twitter (@DuetH2020).

Although DUET is only several months old, we never miss a chance to promote our existence, ambition, pilots and tools among stakeholders that can help us grow as a project. First opportunity came last year with ATC's participation in the BDVA Activity Group. BDVA is a membership organisation whose mission is to develop a multi-actor ecosystem for driving AI-enabled digital transformation across Europe. At the Group's meeting, ATC together with other members discussed how Big Data and AI can help cities make better data driven decisions. Digital twins received a lot of interest due to their strong innovation potential. However, it was noticed that the concept, although widespread in the business community, has yet to gain momentum in the public sector. New case studies are needed to convince more public authorities to embed digital twins in their policy framework. In this context, the Group welcomed DUET's work in three pilot areas - Flanders, Pilsen, Athens - and expressed interest in receiving any updates that would strengthen BDVA's knowledge base in this field. Then in January 2020 DUET attended the Connected Smart Cities & Communities Conference. Organised by the project partner OASC, it brings together hundreds of city representatives, companies, researchers and policy makers to discuss how we could make the digital economy and society more open, interoperable and sustainable. During a special 'green track,' another project partner imec (represented by Tanguy Coenen) weighed in on the debate about climate-neutral smart cities. The main question was - how can we meet environmental targets set by the Paris Agreement and UN SDGs in the age of increasing urbanisation, industrialisation and digitisation? Buildings account for around 40% of carbon emissions. Built environment is one of the sectors identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a priority area for reducing global GHG levels. "Digital twin technology and other ICTs have the potential to revolutionise how we manage, interact and operate the buildings in our local communities," said Coenen. "The proliferation of real-time sensors, big data and cloud computing enables the creation of digital replicas of entire communities. We can simulate how things will look and interact under different scenarios. For example, we can find out what opportunities are available for using renewables or what savings could be achieved through a community-wide heating system.” Tanguy Coenen sharing his thoughts with the audience at CSCC conference 2020 If you have a story about digital twins, we would love to hear from you. Alternatively, for more information on our pilots or to find out about our forthcoming events, don't hesitate to subscribe to the newsletter and follow DUET on social media (@DuetH2020).

The explosion of data along with enabling technologies (artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing etc.) is already driving a paradigm shift in the way cities and regions are governed. However, many public administrations are still at the start of the transformation journey and progress in general has been slow. Past studies found that only 12% of city data is analysed and used for decision making and management, leaving the vast majority of the corpus untouched. Why are cities not taking advantage of the data-rich environment that surrounds them? Assuming cities find a way to harness most of this data, how can we ensure they make the most of it to inform agile, forward looking policy making? These questions paved the way for a bigger discussion about Digital Twins at the project kick-off meeting held on 9-10 December 2019 in Antwerp. DUET partners learn about the features of Antwerp Digital Twin from imec DUET is a brand new innovation project which leverages the advanced capabilities of cloud and high-performance computing, in the form of Digital Twins, to help public sector decision-making become more democratic and effective. By creating digital replica's of a city, people, no matter their background, can use the Digital Twins 3D and 2D interfaces for easy policy impact exploration and experimentation across entire cities and regions. DUET's use of Digital Twins truly changes the policy game, disrupting the field of Smart Cities and transitioning to a new age of Responsive Cities. With Responsive Cities, solutions are not designed around citizens, they are designed with the citizen placed firmly at the center of the action. Where Smart Cities are technology driven and produce large amounts of data from fixed or centrally controlled sensors, Responsive Cities recognise that citizens are also a major player in data generation which helps to shape real-time city decisions. Initially, DUET will be developed and tested in Antwerp, Pilsen and Athens. These pilots start from different positions on the digital twin journey. Antwerp has a working prototype. Pilsen has the tools but not an integrated solution. Athens lacks both. However, all three believe in the concept, sharing a conviction that digital twin technology is key to effective, future-proof policy making. By the end of the project, each pilot receives a solution commensurate with their city’s digital maturity, smart city strategy, political buy-in and budget. Antwerp Digital Twin in action: demo of noise simulation We start by testing DUET in the smart city environment, with local administrations as main users. However, a fully developed solution has no restrictions when it comes to potential adopters. City halls, companies (big and small), universities, emergency services all are using DUET because it is cheaper, more advanced and user-friendly than competitor solutions. Thanks to DUET, organisations are more responsive, reacting rapidly to real-time events; policy decisions are faster and more effective, and relationships with citizens are improved. To make DUET’s vision statement easy to understand and coalesce around, it has been broken down into three core project focus areas, and condensed into one simple to understand sentence for each of those areas. Cities: DUET makes it easy for any city, no matter how large or small, to use cloud & AI to realise the full potential of city data and drive an era of informed, intelligent and co-created policy making. Technology: DUET leverages cloud and high powered computing to connect physical and cyber systems resulting in a near real-time, digital footprint of a city for exploration and experimentation. Standards: DUET’s Policy-Ready-Data-as-a-Service (PRDaaS) advances global standards for city data enabling a digital twin to be set-up in one-click for systemic policy impact exploration and experimentation. ​As a cooperative endeavour involving 15 different partners from across Europe, we are always on the look out for new collaboration opportunities. If you are interested in Digital Twins, have an initiative to share, or want to connect for any reason at all just drop us a line using the contact form.

On 19-21 November, more than 24 thousand visitors from all over the world convened in Barcelona for the ninth edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress. This year’s hot topics covered a wide range of areas, from 5G to Digital Twins, from micro-mobility to Intelligent Transport Systems, from rural-urban links to data governance and digital rights. If you couldn’t make it, here are the three main takeaways according to DUET whose team spent three full days at the event. DUET shared the exhibition space provided by the Open & Agile Smart Cities Network with a number of other EU projects, among them PoliVisu, Select4Cities and SynchroniCity. (1) Digital Twins have greatly benefited from advances in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data analytics and the Internet of Things all of which added a new dimension to this modeling concept. However, implementing the Digital Twin technology requires a strong digital culture. And because Digital Twins are a relatively recent phenomenon, we need more case studies and best practices to promote their adoption on a wider scale. Digital Twins provide a virtual model of a place, process, product or service, allowing users to monitor systems and head off problems before they occur. A kind of modeling exercise, Digital Twins help answer “then-what?” and “what-if?” questions by simulating the impact of change on status quo. In the context of smart cities, having a virtual replica of a place comes in handy as policy makers and planners can use the city model to better manage resources, prevent systems’ downtime, reduce carbon footprint and improve vital services, to name just a few opportunities. This makes Digital Tweens heavily dependent on data e.g. government data, in-situ data, 3D models, real-time IoT data. And that is just one challenge impeding their global adoption as cities with small budgets and nascent digital culture will simply find the whole endeavor too costly, too sophisticated. Additionally, delivering early success is crucial for Digital Twin’s long-term’s success. Potential adopters need to see the benefits sooner than later to add to the momentum and become part of the movement. (2) Today, there is a widespread expectation that policy making should be more agile to keep pace with societal changes driven significantly by the rapid development and deployment of emerging technologies. As governments strive to keep pace with the 4th Industrial Revolution, it is important not to lose sight of simple tools to connect with citizens. Cities are complex, multi-faceted systems that in this day and age advance very fast. Public administrations need to keep up with the current pace of innovation to ensure their policies remain fit for purpose. Technologies such as blockchain and cloud computing offer governments a means to burnish their innovation credentials and address a growing demand for more efficiency and transparency. However, while these tools are important, they are not enough. Policy makers should also invest in public facing technologies that are simple enough for an average citizen with basic ICT skills to use/understand. Examples that fall under this category include various GovTech solutions that range from Open Data platforms to web-based traffic visualisations. (3) While ongoing innovations in Big Data, IoT, AI, cloud and edge computing certainly make cities smarter, the question remains whether they have become more inclusive. In reality, the growing dependency on digital devices and real-time communications can exacerbate inequalities between the haves (people with skills, devices and access to internet) and the have-nots. The digital ecosystem also entails new risks arising from data breaches, cyber-attacks and service disruption. Thus there is an urgent need for decision makers in the public, private and third sectors to mobilise societal resources to manage the transition to a digital ecosystem, one that is safe, inclusive and sustainable. The benefits of ICT innovations are clear: greater efficiency, increased productivity, more agile economy. Mixed with these benefits, however, is also a widespread fear that incessant digitization will exacerbate the digital divide between digital natives and digital newbies. With over 40% of the world’s population without internet access, services which are primarily offered online (‘digital first’ approach), could further isolate those without access and/or appropriate skills, thus increasing the risk for vulnerable groups to fall further behind our rapidly progressing digital society. Another challenge related to increasing digitization concerns cyber security. The ubiquity of cloud computing and a general trend towards integration means that more systems are now online than ever before, which makes them vulnerable to sophisticated cyber-attacks. If these challenges are not duly addressed, the kind of future we were promised might not be so bright after all, with many more losers than winners. To conclude, it’s hard to find an area where the Fourth Industrial Revolution hasn’t left its mark. From mobility to energy and environment, everything these days is affected by changes in data and ICTs that continue their relentless pace year after year. Because of that, governments increasingly rely on evidence-based knowledge and advanced data driven tools to leverage new technologies and make informed policy decisions. DUET is pleased that its Digital Twins will go some way to addressing this need. The project starts in December 2019 and we’ll be share more exciting news from our pilot cities regularly after that. Watch this space.

The volume of data in the world is massive and growing exponentially. Every day studies tells us we are in the midst of a 4th revolution, the data revolution. 90% of the data generated worldwide since the beginning of time has been generated in the last 2 years. Recent forecasts state that we will reach 163 zettabytes of data by 2025 (IDC Whitepaper). Whilst the transformational potential of data is not disputed, cities still have a long way to go to fully leverage the power of this data for more responsive and effective city management. The emergence of a) the Internet-of-Things generating useful data from city sensors, and b) Cloud storage and computing, has created new opportunities for harnessing city data, generating new tools, techniques and businesses focused on enhancing city understanding and the city experience. Surprisingly, despite these new capabilities, only 2% of all the data in the world is effectively utilised, with just 12% of city data used for policy making. As expected, the private sector is ahead of the game, and own much of the richer, more useful data that is generated daily by the city. For example, they own mobility data from people’s smartphones, commerce data from store and credit cards, data from privately owned sensors and more, using it to increase the quality of their services and revenue potential. Government, despite the move towards Open Data in the last ten years, are being left behind. Whilst thousands of open data sets are available for reuse across Europe, take-up remains low. European, National and Local open data portals have poor name recognition and a smaller number of datasets are downloaded than expected. Europe is not reaching its full potential, with an overall maturity score of 65% in 2018’s EU Open Data Maturity Report (2018). This data has not turned out to be the ‘new oil’ many predicted. The reason for struggling impact is due to many factors including: the lack of data quality in all dimensions: consistency, accuracy, coverage, freshness, and completeness; the lack of data interoperability to ensure mobility of services keeps up with the mobility of the users; the lack of data understanding (data literacy) to enable meaningful interpretation of data in the form of information, and; the lack of useful real-time data sources which have the potential to deliver the most impact. Aside from the data itself, an over reliance on traditional analytics techniques, and lack of an infrastructure with the needed processing power to analyse the volume and variety of city data fast enough has also hampered progress. Despite the economics of sharing hardware and software, in reality the costs for sending data to and retrieving it from the cloud is often more expensive than in-house storage. Data sharing and reuse also amplifies subtle and complex questions of interpretation, transparency, collaboration and trust that form a number of data ethics concerns, along with confusion around balancing the principles of ‘openness’ and ‘privacy’. Use of data must meet wider ethical requirements including; A clear public benefit; Use only to the extent proportionate to the need; Recognition of the limitations of the data used (including the risks of taking decisions on incomplete or inaccurate data) and; A precautionary approach, with transparency and accountability in the acquisition, processing, storage and use of data, i.e. ensuring that the algorithms driving HPC analytics are open and fair. Whilst there is a big movement towards open government, it’s not correct for administrations to automatically assume that ‘open,’ ‘shared’ and ‘public’ are synonymous with the principle of public good. Many who are reluctant to make data public often have concerns about how it is reused, after all research has shown several examples of surprising correlations which can unintentionally disclose sensitive information about persons in public datasets (Accenture, the ethics of data sharing). Even if personal privacy is protected, Administrations must consider if the citizens providing the data would support the way that their data is being used, and would they have provided it if they had known how it would be used? This is not a straightforward process which requires policy and regulations to be developed with stakeholders and social partners, as it cannot be left to the technologists alone (a 2018 survey by StackOverflow found that 80% of developers wanted to know what their code would be used for, however 40% wouldn’t rule out writing unethical code, and 80% did not feel responsible for the use of their unethical code). Together, all the issues above combine to put cities off publishing and sharing data, meaning many notable European open data projects focused on empowering and upskilling citizens in using data and enhancing city decision-making, never achieve their true potential for collaboration and innovation. Public administrations seem destined to remain stuck in a world of pilots, with data literacy capacity remaining low, so their results rarely hit the mainstream the same way as private sector offerings do. Imagine if cities could overcome these challenges and utilise lessons from the private sector that help to move beyond the 12%, using fresh approaches to bring together existing and new data sources (structured and unstructured) via an underpinning infrastructure which creatively aggregates them in a way that makes the data more valuable both in its quality and usefulness. A new Cloud enabled approach for the public sector that will aggregate city data adhering to legal and ethical principles, and intuitively make it easy to understand by all. An approach that removes concerns around ethics and skills and unlocks the real potential in open data for driving future decisions for cities whilst simultaneously enhancing today’s city experience for all. To take advantage of the increasing opportunities presented by vast amounts of city data for improving policy making three major barriers must be overcome: 1. Lack of Access to Computing Power: Cities need cost-effective access to high levels of computing power to creatively unlock tangible benefits from large quantities of different data, and enable real-time decision making. 2. Lack of Data Literacy: City data needs to be easier to understand for all through simple interfaces that enable everyone to understand the issue being addressed, and to be able to contribute ideas, thoughts, own data and feedback towards creating a more sustainable future 3. Lack of Data Ethics: As policymakers move towards using data from multiple sources, using new and creative data models, and advanced analytical techniques and easy to use tools, it is increasingly crucial to ensure that the way the data is collected and used conforms not only to the requirements of the privacy of personal data but also to the wider ethical principles of public benefit, proportionality, a precautionary approach and transparency. New H2020 project DUET tackles the challenges outlined above to leverage the European Cloud Infrastructure to bring new opportunities to policy-making as follows: 1: Providing access to needed computing power: Real-time city management needs algorithms and computing power that can scale to distill oceans of open data, deliver insights and maintain efficiency. Cloud computing offers the ability for cities to access highly scalable hardware and software resources for the overwhelming majority of IT use cases. However, for future scenario predictions for policy modelling, cities need to execute heavy algorithms and leverage near real-time deployment and processing require the use of high-performance computing (HPC). Cloud computing has not been used for high performance computing (HPC) to the same degree as other use cases for several reasons, namely cost, but DUET will advance this area by providing a new shared approach for its use in policy making and city management – using a Digital Twin. A “Digital Twin” is a new concept consisting of a continuously learning digital copy of real-world assets, systems and processes that can be queried for specific outcomes. DUETs Digital Twins will consume Open Data and Data models from different sources in the city and integrate them with new technology capabilities including HPC, Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics in order to provide a replica city environment where policy experimentation can safely take place. By predicting asset behaviour and capacity to deliver on specific outcomes within given parameters and cost constraints, the Digital Twin provides a risk-free experimentation environment to inform stakeholders what they need to do with the assets in the real-word in order to both achieve the most effective long-term policy outcomes, and short-term operational decisions. 2: Making data easier to understand: Easy to understand visualisations are a critical factor for driving trust in using data for democratic decision making. However, most visualisation platforms still need a degree of geo-expertise to truly use them to extract intelligence. DUET is different as it can provide a 3D interface for its Digital Twins alongside a 2D offering. Users, regardless of their technical or academic background, will be able to walk through DUET’s virtual 3D city neighbourhoods, and directly see dynamic data readings from multiple sources in a familiar context that makes them easy to understand. For example, users may see air quality through colours, traffic congestion as lines, incident sites as icons and so on. This simple, relatable way of viewing the city through multiple integrated data sources brings to life the tangible, systemic impacts of policy options, fueling ‘what if’ experimentation that unleashes creative and innovative qualities of all participants. This levelling of the field means that policy makers, administrative workers, emergency services, entrepreneurs, businesses and citizens can all participate in co-creation and consultation exercises as part of the traditional policy making cycle. 3: Establishing Ethical Principles for Data-Driven Decisions: The game-changing, cloud based, Digital Twin infrastructure with its deep-dive visualisation platform for policy experimentation will boost collaboration and policy innovation and bring new discoveries and intelligence through novel views of the data. Using visualisation tools, analysis of problems can have greater depth as many multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral layers of data relating to the physical and social world can be considered together. Using a Digital Twin users can explore policy impacts across a whole city, rather than just one or two small localities. Instead of providing complicated graphs and multiple versions of maps from different industries to illustrate the impacts of, for example road routing decisions on mobility, air quality and health, the Digital Twin provides one version/replica of the city for all to use as a trusted baseline for exploring systemic impact of decisions. Visualising multiple data sources through the Digital Twin make relationships more apparent, dependencies and interactions more clearly viewed and the trade-off between a variety of possible solutions can be modelled and evaluated. For the first time complex policy will be open for all to easily explore and understand the situation that needs to be improved, experiment with ideas, cocreate potential solutions, and contribute to its formalisation. The DUET project officially begins in December 2019. #BusinessPresentation #PublicSpeaking

DUET is designed to advance policy development in the age of big data and cloud, to deliver a trusted, scalable and transferable Digital Twin solution for accelerating the adoption of data-driven, collaborative decision making and policy-making. It is designed to stimulate the creation of collaborative and innovative solutions to multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral societal challenges by making it easier for policy makers and their stakeholders to access, visualise and use a wide variety of big geo-data sources to explore and co-create policy in the key Horizon 2020 target areas of transportation, environment and health. Using DUET's Digital Twin approach means policy-making no longer needs to be based upon static models of consultation and closed planning over a timeframe of a year or more. Traditional ways of decision making are often siloed and slow, with thinking and solutions out-of-date by the time policy is ready to be implemented. Yet the world has changed; technology has changed the way we work, live and communicate, so solving society's problems in old ways no longer works. Whilst many administrations are utilising a number of innovative solutions to combat multidisciplinary urban challenges (e.g. variable congestion charging to reduce traffic jams, improve air quality and reduce air-related disease) no-one is yet harnessing the full disruptive power provided by combining big data and HPC advanced analytics to develop solutions that enable the collaborative exploration of the systemic impacts of city decisions, utilising the knowledge and experience of a range of urban stakeholders. DUET's use of Cloud truly changes the game, disrupting the field of Smart Cities and transitioning to a new age of Responsive Cities. With Responsive Cities, solutions are not designed around citizens, they are designed with the citizen placed firmly at the centre of the action. Where Smart Cities are technology driven and produce large amounts of data from fixed or centrally controlled sensors, Responsive Cities recognise that citizens are also a major player in data generation which helps to shape real-time city decisions. Embracing the Responsive City concept, DUET's Digital Twin infrastructure uses HPC, AI and other advanced analytics to utilise raw big data and simulate policy impacts via its 3D and 2D interfaces. This enables users (e.g. policy makers, administrative workers, emergency services, charities, entrepreneurs, corporates and citizens) to explore the knock-on effects of decisions on other areas of the city and other sectors (e.g. planning, fire and public safety, transport, social care, waste management etc). These visual interfaces can be explored individually on a user’s chosen device, or blown-up on life-size screens and used for immersive co-creation purposes which bring to life the tangible, systemic impacts of different policy options on the city experience. These fuel ‘what if’ experimentation that unleashes the creative and innovative qualities of all participants and brings a whole new dimension to stakeholder engagement and consultation. #DigitalTwins #PolicyMaking #BigData