“Digital Twins, Triplets, and the Rest: Families of Simulation Models for Urban Analytics”
February 4, 2020
A lecture by Michael Batty (Bartlett Professor of Planning, University College London and Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA))
The idea of a digital twin has recently caught the imagination of those working in urban analytics as well as other areas of computational social science. You might think that there is no such thing as a digital twin for anything digital is probably a model of the real thing and as such, it is not the real thing: it is an abstraction, a simplification, leaving a lot more out than that which is within. So how can it be a twin? And in any case, as we all know there are many digital versions of the real thing, many different models of the system that we aim to simulate. In this paper/presentation, I will discuss the idea of the digital twin, focusing on the conundrums that plague our field, but also suggesting that some of our models are getting a lot closer to the real thing, particularly as the real thing itself – in our case the city – is becoming ever more digital. In some areas, especially those that are concerned with the geometry of the system as in its architecture, then digital versions of the system are increasingly necessary simply to make the system work. In this sense, the twins are becoming inseparable from the system. Here I will present these ideas using some of our own models that illustrate how the infrastructure of the city is increasingly being incorporated into the model.
Organized by Columbia GSAPP’s Urban Planning Program as part of the Lecture in Planning Series.
source
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