The city of Las Vegas, USA has adopted digital twin technology rooted in 5G to become a leader in energy efficiency, air quality and desirable environmental attributes, reversing its long-standing reputation for profligacy over electricity consumption fueled by insatiable demand for air conditioning.
Las Vegas has become the second US municipality after New York to participate in the country’s Clean Cities-Clean Future initiative, in this case featuring digital twin technology provided by Cityzenith. The other key component is an IoT data exchange platform based on 5G connectivity provided by Terbine, which has set up its stall in that field. Terbine has articulated a grand vision of IoT data becoming a commodity traded like money, oil or gold, requiring a more mature data communication infrastructure to become viable.
As the first part of this latest initiative, a large part of downtown Las Vegas will be equipped with a 5G network coupled with that IoT and digital twin technology to focus on applications in mobility, air quality, noise pollution and water management, as well as carbon emissions from the many buildings.
“Digital twins are rapidly becoming vital to how cities are run,” said Las Vegas CIO Michael Sherwood. “Now in Las Vegas we will have a city-scale digital twin that is driven by the physical environment, and ultimately letting us control key systems through it. This will give us new levels of insights and control to benefit city planners, residents, and businesses.”
Digital twins enable physical systems to be simulated in software. It is a field with roots going back to the dawn of computing, but one that has advanced enormously in recent years as a result of the extraordinary progress in processing power and storage density. The first notable example came in 1970 with the NASA Apollo 13 mission, which was aborted shortly after launch, leaving the sole important goal of bringing the crew back alive when there was no alternative but to complete the journey around the moon. This mission was accomplished largely because NASA had a model of the spacecraft allowing engineers to test and plan the rescue.
This was not called a digital twin then, but was essentially an early version. The concept then took root in various manufacturing and engineering sectors, especially chip making, but was limited by the intensity of the computation involved, such that it took a few hours of compute time to simulate a few seconds of execution.
More recently, advances in the design and practice of digital twin technology have enabled increasingly accurate digital representations of chip designs and helped advance the process further down to scales, such as 5-nanometer, then 3nm and even 2nm, thought unattainable just a decade or so ago. Again, the continual proliferation in compute power and concomitant advances in machine learning have made digital twin systems able to verify chip designs faster, as well as more comprehensively, than ever before.
This has extended digital twin technology further out across manufacturing, in automotive particularly. Tesla now creates a digital twin of every car it makes, employed during design, assembly and subsequent afterlife in the field when additions or enhancements are made. This enables designs to be constantly tried and re-evaluated to tweak performance, with data continuously flowing between the production line and digital twin.
The role of digital twin is gaining even more currency on the road towards fully autonomous vehicles by facilitating evaluation of onboard systems against simulated traffic conditions, aiming to accelerate testing for compliance and safety.
Similar principles apply in building design, construction, improvement and maintenance. In this case simulation via computer aided design) has been practiced for around four decades, but hamstrung not just by lack of power but also incompatibilities, with data often isolated in silos.
Cityzenith has come in to specialize in the application of digital twin technology harnessing 5G to building design, while expanding it to space usage, traffic management and energy efficiency on a larger multi-building scale.
This led to its selection for the Las Vegas project, although digital twin technology has already been harnessed in smart city projects outside the USA. Singapore, for some years the poster child of the smart city, in 2020 completed a $55m digital replica of the entire city for civil servants to conduct virtual experiments and assess the impact of new policies before implementation. The city’s Building and Construction Authority has been looking to extend that beyond civil service applications as part of its Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD) plan to boost the construction and engineering sector’s use of technology.
In the most recent development, Singapore announced in October 2021 that it was developing a digital twin of its power grid to improve the reliability of electricity supply and support deployment of sustainable energy sources. This will allow remote monitoring of power grid assets such as substations, transformers, switch gears and cables in real time and enable the impact of changes to be assessed. This will be able to ride on the city state’s first 5G network, rolled out by Nokia and SP Telecom alongside this power grid.
Digital twin technology then is making a growing impact in smart building design and operation, fanning out across towns and cities for wider optimization of power supplies and energy management.