Barcelona tests 15-min city viability with the help of digital twin

The platform allows the visualization of future additions to the city and to predict whether they make the city more pedestrian-friendly

Yesterday, the Barcelona City Council and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center presented the first results coming from a collaborative smart platform called a Digital Twin, which allows visualizing the possibility of implementing the 15-min city concept locally.

According to officials behind the project, this is a proof of concept that will serve as a starting point for more elaborate analyses. Through the creation of urban digital twins, simulations will be carried out with the final aim of optimizing the design of public policies.

Virtual urban planning

This has made it possible to see, for example, the coverage within a 10-minute walk of the metro stops, before and after the opening of the future lines L8 and L9; the network of libraries before and after the last one that has been built in Sant Martí de Provençals, the electric charging points, the Bicing stations, health facilities or distribution of green spaces in the city.

Cities are a set of highly complex systems. The objective of the development of this Digital Twin of the city of proximity has been to approach the understanding of the urban phenomenon through data analysis, the evaluation of resources, understanding the accessibility of services and working with models which are still a simplification of this complexity to try to make it comprehensible.

The models allow working with hypotheses, generating scenarios and visualizing multiple variables or combinations of variables that can be crucial when making decisions.

The advantage that Digital Twins offer over previous approaches to analytics and data visualization is that they allow the integration of data from multiple sources in real-time and the evaluation of future scenarios through complex simulations. The development of these tools allows a more efficient administration of resources.

And the fact is that testing the different options to solve a problem in digital twins can anticipate results and save conflicts. They are, therefore, a tool that in the future should help, in this case, the Barcelona City Council, to make the most correct decisions to improve the quality of life of the citizens.