Volume 62

The World Avatar: A New Era in Digital Twinning for Sustainable Urban Development Yong Ren Tan, Kushagar Rustagi, Ralf Mueller, Torben Stüehrmann, Minsheng Xu, Jethro Akroyd, Markus Kraft

Abstract

This paper presents The World Avatar (TWA) as an evolution of connected digital twinning, founded on the idea of a general knowledge representation of the world at large. TWA adopts a unique approach to data integration, analysis, and, most importantly, the inclusion of the space of all possible concepts and world knowledge. More importantly, TWA serves as a dynamic framework for representing complex, evolving systems, supporting seamless human-machine interactions with diverse and dynamic data sources. To demonstrate these capabilities, we present four case studies across German cities, each of which highlights a specific complex urban challenge and demonstrates how TWA can interoperate across spatial, temporal, and real-time data to address these challenges. The case studies highlight the capabilities of TWA in supporting real-time decision-making processes, which are critical for urban sustainability and infrastructure development. This work demonstrates the significant advantages of TWA over conventional digital twin technologies, providing urban planners and policymakers with powerful tools to create more resilient, intelligent, and flexible systems for urban management. TWA shows the potential to equip cities with the capacity to enhance resilience and optimise infrastructure planning. This could enable cities to adopt sustainable, data-driven solutions and build more flexible, resilient, and intelligent urban infrastructure.

Keywords Digital twins, Knowledge graphs, The World Avatar, Smart cities, Data integration, Ontologies