Digital Twin Collaborative Platforms: Applications to Humans-in-the-Loop Crafting of Urban Areas

The opportunity to foresee how a physical system might work in advance, resorting to its digital model, explains the general attractiveness of digital twins. The use of digital twins, especially in the manufacturing context, encourages the investigation of the benefits that may bring in many circumstances, ranging from medical to commercial applications. In this work, however, we do not introduce yet another field where digital twins may be applied but, instead, propose digital twins as part of a convergence of technologies that may be put to good use to foster advanced distributed collaboration platforms to support humans in the loop. To clarify our proposal, we contextualize the proposed methodology by providing a conceptual framework related to a Virtual Hackable City, where we explain the advantages of such an approach.