The Smart Cities Council has announced the participating cohort in their 2021 Digital Twin Challenge, as well as the projects to be developed in the coming years.
The Digital Twin Challenge cohort will advance a series of 13 projects to help show what is possible with Digital Twin capability, and how it supports the activation of data in a way that supports decision makers.
The Digital Twin Challenge includes a program of activities that will ultimately benefit the broader marketplace through the development and release of critical knowledge resources.
Smart Cities Council Executive Director, Adam Beck, said, “We are at a crossroads in terms of our global commitments such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement. We believe data leadership and data activation is key to helping us in meeting these commitments.
“With less than a decade left to make significant productivity, equity and sustainability gains for our communities, the Council is going ‘all-in’ on the enabling power of data activation, and the Digital Twin is the superior approach.
“Across Australia and New Zealand, the value of data in helping deliver more sustainable infrastructure, providing the best community services, promoting economic development and repairing our critical ecosystem services is becoming more evident.
“We now urgently require the standards, templates, tools and guidance documents to realise this opportunity. The Digital Twin Challenge will help deliver this.
“The Digital Twin Challenge is the only program of its type globally that is seeking to build a series of assets in a collaborative learning environment that will be shared openly for free for government and industry around the world to benefit from.
“Our goal is to help others accelerate their Digital Twin capability and journey by having a headstart and avoiding duplication on common Digital Twin use cases and capability development activities,” Mr Beck said.
The 13 projects forming the Digital Twin Challenge range from strategy, data framework and project-level action plans, to landscape-based Digital Twins, GIS and IoT capability templates. Organisation-wide Digital Twin education modules as well as urban planning and design use cases feature in the project list.
“The most exciting part of the Digital Twin Challenge is going to be the deep engagement among the participating cohort members, who represent public, private and research sectors with interests spanning natural resource conservation, economic development, construction and asset operation, public health and wellbeing and education,” Mr Beck said.
“Working with our government project co-leads will be a range of private sector and academic peers, sharing their expertise in a collaborative environment to create the next generation of Digital Twin knowledge resources.”
The 2021 Digital Twin Challenge participating cohort members are:
- Autonomation in partnership with ADG Construction Digital Services
- Beca
- City of Launceston, Tasmania Australia
- City of Melbourne, Victoria Australia
- FrontierSI
- Geoscape Australia
- GHD
- GRID Lab @ University of New South Wales
- Lake Macquarie City Council, New South Wales Australia
- Marlborough District Council, New Zealand
- Moreton Bay Regional Council, Queensland Australia
- Office of Planetary Observations
- PCSG
- Sydney Water
- Thinkproject
- WSP
The Digital Twin Challenge will be underpinned by a series of activities, including:
- Deep peer-to-peer knowledge sharing among the cohort on a monthly basis
- A series of international exchanges, in-person intensives and public webinars
- Regular industry updates sharing progress, via quarterly reporting and the annual Digital Twin Week event
- Use of the Smart Cities Activator Platform to create digital roadmaps for Digital Twin use cases and strategy development processes.
For more information about the Digital Twin Challenge, what the projects are, click here.
