Combining Open Source and Commercial Tools in Digital Twin for Cities Generation
Paper in proceeding, 2022

Evidently, Smart Cities are on the rise and there is an increasing need for digital twins of these complex environments and their corresponding 3D models. The creation and maintenance of such twins is a time consuming task, since cities are living evolving organisms. In this paper we are presenting work done within the Digital Twin Cities Centre (DTCC) in Sweden in the field of automated 3D city model generation. We showcase a novel method of combining open source and commercial software for creating digital twins of any urban context in a procedural way from raw input data and using Unreal Engine as a visualization front-end. We combine two different workflows, one based on the commercial software suite Feature Manipulation Engine and in parallel we utilize the open source code developed within the Centre, dubbed DTCC Builder. The assets created can be used in urban planning, multiphysics continuum mechanics simulations and for visualization and illustration on a 3D scale. By using, in a complementary way, established commercial software and state of the art open source C++ code we manage to utilize the quality of life features the first provides, while assigning the demanding tasks of comforming mesh generation to the former. The longer term goal is (nearly) real-time mesh digital twinning of any city and user interaction with the 3D assets provided. Copyright (C) 2022 The Authors.

Digital Prototyping

FME

Data pipelines

Digital Twins

Unreal Engine

3D city models

Author

Vasilis Naserentin

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Applied Mathematics and Statistics

Sanjay Somanath

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Building Technology

Orfeas Eleftheriou

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Applied Mathematics and Statistics

Anders Logg

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Applied Mathematics and Statistics

IFAC-PapersOnLine

2405-8963 (ISSN) 24058963 (eISSN)

Vol. 55 11 185-189

IFAC Workshop on Control for Smart Cities (CSC)
Sozopol, Bulgaria,

Digital Twin Cities Centre

VINNOVA (2019-00041), 2020-02-29 -- 2024-12-31.

Subject Categories

Other Computer and Information Science

Software Engineering

Computer Science

DOI

10.1016/j.ifacol.2022.08.070

More information

Latest update

10/25/2023