IIC Journal of Innovation 12th Edition | Page 54

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 - 49 -