Design and Develop of a Smart City Digital Twin with 3D Representation and User Interface for What-If Analysis

Digital Twins of Smart Cities are fundamental tools for decision makers since they can provide interactive 3D visualizations of the city enriched with real-time information and connected to actual complete digital model of the entities with all their heterogeneous data/info. Such a technology can be exploited to observe the status of the city, and to perform analysis and simulations, and thus to develop strategies. Indeed, such solutions must satisfy a series of requirements spanning from the 3D construction to the interactive functionality of user interface for the decision makers. In this paper, a Smart City Digital Twin model and tools are presented, which satisfy a wide range of requirements. The principles at the basis of the design and development are reported and discussed. The solution has been developed on top of Snap4City platform and validated on Florence City case (Italy), in CN Mobility of Ministry. Finally, a comparison among several different Smart City Digital Twin solutions is offered. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.