Urban Intelligence: a Modular, Fully Integrated, and Evolving Model for Cities Digital Twinning

The Urban Intelligence (UI) paradigm proposes an ecosystem of technologies to improve urban environment, wellbeing, quality of life and smart city systems. It fosters the definition of a digital twin of the city, namely a cyber-physical counterpart of all the city systems and sub-systems. Here we propose a novel approach to UI that extends available frameworks combining advanced multidisciplinary modelling of the city, simulation and learning tools with numerical optimization techniques, each of them specialized for the digital representation of city systems and subsystems, including not only city infrastructures, but also city users and their interactions. UI provides sets of candidate policies in complex scenarios and supports policy makers and stakeholders in designing sustainable and personalized solutions. The main characteristics of the proposed UI architecture are (a) fully multidisciplinary integration of city layers, (b) connection and evolution with the city, (c) integration of participative strategies to include “human-oriented” information, and (d) modularity of application.