An Exploratory Comparison Analysis of Smart City Digital Twin Development Protocols: Open-Source Versus Proprietary Development Pipelines

Abstract

United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) states cities intake 75 percent of the world’s energy and material flows and consumption (Hämäläinen, 2020). Urban areas are a thicket of man-made and environmental systems that intake, output, and change in response to external energy and material flows (Hämäläinen, 2020). Researchers have experiemented digitally conceptualizing and visualizing said urban systems via a large catelogue of technologies. One common technological conceptualization is a city-scale digital twin. A digital twin, a virtual representation of physical elements with an embedded two-way connection between both the physical and virtual worlds, is one response that daylights urban systems at work. City-scale digital twin creation has reached a tipping point, procedurally, as an explosion of low-code digital twin creation tools have become more accessible to a wide audience of technical and non-technical users. This exploratory evaluation measures two digital twin development protocols (one that uses predominately open-source tools and the other that uses predominately proprietary tools) by a common evaluation framework. Both of the evaluated digital twin development protocols rate highly within the evaluation framework by either demonstrating concretely or demonstrating potential completion of 18 out of the 23 evaluation criteria elements for the creation of comprehensive city-scale digital twins. With more time to process data, open source software meets the same, in some aspects visually more details digital twin products quality benchmarks as predominantly proprietary protocols. The case studies reference tourist sites within Aras de los Olmos, Spain.