Digital Twin for Smart Cities: Linking the Physical and Digital Built Environment

A special issue of Smart Cities (ISSN 2624-6511).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2021) | Viewed by 8086

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Information Systems in the Built Environment, Built Environment, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 5612AZ, the Netherlands
Interests: smart cities; digital twin; linked data; urban infrastructure; mobility

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Guest Editor
School of Civil Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China
Interests: smart city construction; urban resilience; sustainable city
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
School of Construction Management Technology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907, USA
Interests: building/infrastructure information modeling; construction management; human factors and applied ergonomics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The increasing role of innovations in information and communication technologies have made cities smarter to run their systems more efficiently and effectively. Our physical and digital worlds are slowly merging. Cities are running with different types of inter-connected systems intended for the better management of urban and natural resources of cities to improve the quality of life of their residents, giving rise to the so-called digital twin cities. The term digital twin has been used as an example of revolution and is considered fundamental to transformation. These new services promise to be the answer to many societal problems. However, the rapid shift also brings many challenges. The heterogeneity of domains, systems, data, and the relationships between them in a city requires information expressed in a flexible and extensible way while promoting interoperability between systems and applications in order to make a more resilient and sustainable city. So far, the rather uncontrolled development of technology by many sectors led to organizational silos, with a broad range of different standards representing these silos. Smart city architectures must consider many requirements and stakeholders related to it. The ontology-based modeling of the built environment is promising for successfully integrating disparate knowledge silos and has gained significant attraction in industry and academia.

In response to these challenges, this Special Issue will focus on how ontology catalogs can be more effectively used to design and develop smart city applications. This issue will explore, but not be limited to, the following topics:

  • Linked data and the semantic web technology applications in cities
  • Smart buildings and asset management
  • Autonomous vehicles and smart transportation system
  • Circularity and repurpose materials
  • Infrastructure asset management
  • Ontology development in smart cities
  • Ontology evaluation in the domain of smart cities
  • Automated ontology matching
  • Case studies and implementations of smart cities
  • Towards a semantic construction digital twin

Dr. Dujuan Yang
Prof. Dr. Dezhi Li
Dr. Yunfeng Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Smart Cities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Linked data
  • Semantic web technology
  • Digital twins
  • Transportation information modeling
  • Building information modeling
  • Construction and maintenance
  • Infrastructure
  • Resilience
  • Asset management

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 2907 KiB  
Article
Participatory Governance of Smart Cities: Insights from e-Participation of Putrajaya and Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
by Seng Boon Lim and Tan Yigitcanlar
Smart Cities 2022, 5(1), 71-89; https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities5010005 - 14 Jan 2022
Cited by 34 | Viewed by 6890
Abstract
Participatory governance is widely viewed as an essential element of realizing planned smart cities. Nonetheless, the implementation of e-participation platforms, such as the websites and mobile applications of civic authorities, often offer ambiguous information on how public voices may influence e-decision-making. This study [...] Read more.
Participatory governance is widely viewed as an essential element of realizing planned smart cities. Nonetheless, the implementation of e-participation platforms, such as the websites and mobile applications of civic authorities, often offer ambiguous information on how public voices may influence e-decision-making. This study aims to examine the status of participatory governance from the angle of e-participation platforms and from the broader scope of linking e-platforms to a smart city blueprint. In order to achieve this aim, the study focuses on shedding light on the e-governance space given to smart city realization in a developing country context—i.e., Malaysia. The Putrajaya and Petaling Jaya smart cities of Malaysia were selected as the testbeds of the study, which used the multiple case study methodology and multiple data collection designs. The analyses were done through the qualitative observations and quantitative descriptive statistics. The results revealed that both of the investigated smart city cases remained limited in their provision of e-decision-making space. The inefficiency of implementing planned initiatives to link the city blueprints to e-platforms was also evidenced. The study evidenced that the political culture of e-decision-making is undersized in Malaysia, which hinders the achievement of e-democracy in the smart cities’ development. This study has contributed a case report on a developing country’s smart cities, covering the participatory issues from the angle of e-participation and e-platforms. Full article
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