Creating Cities of the Future with Digital Twin Technology
experience for a digital twin Smart City
planning tool featuring DER assets such as
solar panels, solar arrays and battery storage
devices. A user interacts with the planning
tool via a web application that consists of
two main screens, a neighborhood map
overview and a forecasted results
dashboard. The use case under test involves
sectionalizing a neighborhood grid or
creating a microgrid. The user experience is
easily expanded to other use cases such as
adding trees, adding cool roof materials,
altering traffic patterns and visualizing
proposed modifications to the infrastructure
that exists below the neighborhood such as
wastewater, service water and other
subterranean city infrastructure. The next
few paragraphs explain the user interaction
for the DER planning use case.
In Figure 3, a neighborhood map screen
features digital twin representations of
renewable energy assets such as solar
panels, solar arrays and battery storage
devices. The concept relies on an open
architecture for those twin objects and
anticipates an extensible set of twins such as
trees, EV chargers and energy efficient
materials. It is envisioned that the platform
will feature preloaded algorithms for
distributed energy forecasting and planning,
as well as plug-in third-party algorithms from
climate scientists, material scientists and city
planners. Finally, the user interface (UI) is
envisioned as role-based and secure.
Figure 3: Neighborhood Map
IIC Journal of Innovation
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