Towards Resilient Cities through Digital Coupled Human, nAture and INfrastructure Systems (CHAINS)

Worldwide, cities face unprecedented pressures to provide adequate resources, infrastructure, services, and resilience plans against climate change. The overarching goal of urban management and development (UMD) is to benefit all human beings while mitigating environmental impacts to a maximum extent for the good of the planet and the quality of life it promotes. Digital innovations like Digital Twins (DTs) have emerged as promising tools for tackling UMD challenges by enabling data-driven decision-making, predictive modelling, and scenario analysis. Given the consensus that DTs fundamentally depend on data to mirror cities, here, based on over 10 years’ study, we define a DT from a data perspective as a dynamic virtual representation integrating heterogeneous data sources to capture the city's complexity across three key dimensions: (1) physical assets and city form, (2) processes, services and systems, and (3) human activities. It enables real-time monitoring, predictive modelling, and informed decision-making for UMD. Accordingly, my research talk will cover three perspectives from twinning the cities towards resilient cities: (1) proposing multi-modal data-driven digital twinning processes and further supporting automatically updating semantic and information-rich DTs; (2) developing the ‘Five-layer Multi-scale Digital Twin Theory (FMDTT) - People’ to build the bidirectional relationships between the physical and digital worlds, and further create the feedback loops with people; (3) protecting all road networks and users from destructive climate hazard chains through the dynamic people-centric ‘Road-Flood-User CHAINS (Coupled Human, nAture and INfrastructure Systems)’ digital twin, further toward next-generation resilient cities. Together, the whole research map offers a pathway to align DT development towards global sustainability goals. Moreover, future directions and possible solutions will also be presented.