SMART CITY DIGITAL TWIN: A SYSTEM-OF-SYSTEMS APPROACH

Abstract

The concept of smart cities has emerged to battle the problems facing cities from rapid urbanization and mismanagement of resources. In order to monitor and control these large-scale environments such as cities, digital twins were proposed. These digital twins represent a large-scale environment virtually and connect it to the physical world. However, complexity arises when studying these cities. A city is a complex system of interconnected systems, or a system-of-systems (SoS), according to definitions by systems engineering. To understand how SoS can be applied to a smart city digital twin, a literature review is first conducted on SoS applications in construction in order to understand how to apply it to the different parts of a smart city. This paper the proposes a unique view on smart city digital twins by applying the system-of-systems engineering approach to view the cities and thereby understand and model them.