Standards Development

Scope

The Technical Specification provides gap analysis on standards related to City Information Modelling and Urban Digital Twins. This Technical Specification:

• defines concepts of City Information Modelling and Urban Digital Twins;

• collects the case studies how cities are using City Information Modelling and Digital Twin technologies;

• identifies the standards being used;

• scopes out the requirements for new standards and for possible revision of existing standards; and

• provides recommendations for Standard Development Organizations (SDOs)

Purpose

The development and delivery of smart cities involves many different systems, types of data, and sets of information. This complexity, and the dynamic interaction between the large numbers of stakeholders and city systems, makes planning and managing cities a great challenge. Without a tangible operational model to combine cross-sector data and information, the holistic, cross-boundary planning of regions, cities, districts and neighbourhoods remains constrained. Therefore, we need new and effective tools to enable the delivery of better services for citizens and to make the urban environment more liveable, inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.

City Information Modelling (CIM) and Urban Digital Twins (UDT) are two developing technologies for smart cities that aim to provide such tools. Sometimes, other terms are used for UDT, such as city digital twins, spatial digital twins, local digital twins, etc. City Information Modelling applies Building Information Modelling at urban scale while Urban Digital Twins and similar initiatives apply digital twin technology to cities. These all provide solutions for data processing, urban analysis, design, simulation, and modelling. They connect all the stakeholders and actors to collaboratively deliver the vision of Smart Cities and communities: a sustainable, inclusive, healthy, prosperous, and participative society. They provide solutions for smart cities and communities based on open standards and a multiscale database covering different time frames that integrates a wide range of data sources presenting the full range of smart urban features, systems, and processes. The customers and users of such intelligent technology solutions include, but are not limited to, local government, the public sector, businesses, academia, investors and citizens.

CIM and UDT provide tools to help cities and communities be planned and managed in a more effective and holistic way. Because of this, they contribute to all United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Work on both CIM and UDT is still at an early stage. They face common challenges and questions for their future development, which include the data silos, the usability and usefulness of applications for stakeholders, integration, openness, regulation, and the development of the necessary skills and education. Models, data, and software are important components for both CIM and UDT and both need to meet the issues of data collection, data interoperability, data management and security. We still lack unified standards to help manage these.

Standards are essential to ensure that data can freely circulate between various systems that comprise a city or community. Interoperability between software or platform interfaces, federation/linkages among digital twins/CIM platforms covering different city systems and issues, benchmarks for data quality, cloud computing, data analytics, geospatial and 3D modelling, privacy protection and data security are all areas where International Standards can play a significant role and useful part.

Before the standard work, gap analysis of standards related to CIM and UDT is essential. Therefore, this Technical Specification (TS) aims to examine the most up-to-date practice of how cities are using CIM and UDT technologies, and scope out their needs in standards by collecting multiple case studies from the front- line practitioners from different regions in the world covering diverse aspects of city management.

The standards required to support CIM and UDT cover the technical expertise of many different standards committees and SDOs. This proposal is for this piece of work to be conducted by a joint-working group to ensure that the results will help coordinate the work of many standards committees in this area