Digital Twin Waterford – A framework to leverage Digital Twins as a tool for de-carbonising the built environment.
COP27 has recently concluded with countries and companies alike agreeing to decarbonise their assets and operations. Much work, at all lifecycles stages, is required to decarbonise the built environment and Digital Twins are key through tracking embodied carbon to informing design decisions, to charting operational carbon generated from daily activities.
A Digital Twin is a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, synchronised at a specific frequency and fidelity that can have driven outcomes, tailored to use cases, powered by integration, built on data, guided by domain knowledge and implemented on a specialised platform. They accelerate transformation by accelerating holistic understanding, optimal decision making and effective action.
Waterford City stakeholders, including the Council, the Chamber of Commerce and SETU, are also acutely aware of the recently published national ‘Climate Action Plan 2021’. This ambitious plan is intended to put Ireland on a more sustainable path, cutting emissions, creating a cleaner, greener economy and society and protecting us from the devastating consequences of climate change. Monitoring greenhouse cases (particularly carbon) and energy consumption, particularly the transition to renewable sources, in the built environment and physical infrastructure of cities are critical pillars in achieving these objectives.
As a new model for building smart cities, the Digital Twin City (DTC) will reshape the city governance structures and rules and inject a continuous momentum for the development and transformation of cities. Many of the important cities around the world have launched plans to build digital twin cities. The rapid development of digital twin technologies has also made it possible to construct digital twin cities.
This project will align the processes and philosophies of contemporary digital technologies with the monitoring and recording apparatus to achieve our zero carbon climatic goals by developing a dynamic framework for an urban Digital Twin of significant scale.
