Digital Twins Can Solve Biggest Problems Cities Face, IEEE Expert Says

cities don’t know about their cities,” said Mashariki, former chief analytics officer in New York City. Digital twinsand the metaverse are “solving some of our greatest challenges,” including wildfire prevention, 5G signal propagation, and energy and traffic management, he said. “How do we replicate a city in such a way that we can better understand the city, learn more about the city and then apply solutions that have an impact on the residents?” he asked. A digital twin has to offer “a high level of reality,” he said. Working for New York was difficult because when anything bad happened “it happened big,” he said, citing the cascading problems when COVID-19 hit in 2020. “What digital twins allow you to do is look at the full city,” Mashariki said: “You don’t go in and solve one thing. … You have to solve at least nine, 10, 15 other things in concert.” Digital twins are never “simple to build” and have to be built using “real data,” often crowdsourced, he said. “If I build low-income housing here, how does that affect traffic, how does that affect public safety?” he said. New York City has a right-to-housing law, but people never want homeless shelters in their neighborhoods, Mashariki said. “With simulation, if you have real data, you can actually begin to simulate what opening up shelters in which neighborhoods actually looks like,” he said: “Once you build that shelter you have to then track that data and bring it back into your digital twin. This is the hardest part about a digital twin.” One often-cited example is Ericsson’s construction of digital-twin cities in Sweden, accurate in minute details from the locations of trees to the height and composition of buildings (see 2203150078).