From prototype to publication: new insights into urban digital twins for sustainable cities
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Last year, we shared how (former) EngD trainee Daniel Wondyifraw’s work in the LOKET project explored the potential of digital twins for urban construction logistics. That work has now led to a scientific publication, co-authored with JADS Academic Director Jos van Hillegersberg. The publication offers a clearer view of what an open urban digital twin can already do and what still needs to happen before cities can use it at scale.
A next step for the LOKET work
The new paper builds on the digital twin prototype developed for the Innovation Quarter Den Bosch. Its focus is broader than construction logistics alone. The publication shows how an urban digital twin can bring together different streams of information, from traffic and weather to air quality, CO₂ and noise, in one environment that supports monitoring, analysis and decision-making.
That matters because many smart-city systems still operate separately. In practice, cities often work with fragmented tools and data sources that make it harder to respond to complex questions. The study argues for an open and modular approach, so municipalities are not locked into one closed platform and can extend the system as new needs emerge.
From visualization to real-time interaction
One of the main contributions of the publication is the technical architecture behind the prototype. The system combines a real-time data pipeline with time-series storage and a 3D city model for ’s-Hertogenbosch. This makes it possible to overlay live and simulated data in a shared digital environment and follow what is happening across locations and themes.
The paper also introduces ODIN, a conversational interface designed to make the digital twin easier to use for non-technical users. Instead of relying only on dashboards or database queries, users can ask questions in natural language. In the tests described in the study, a hybrid setup with local and hosted language models performed best, showing strong potential for making urban data more accessible in everyday practice.
Conclusion
With this publication, earlier prototype work has moved into a scientific context and gained sharper definition. The paper shows how urban digital twins can support more integrated and accessible decision-making, while also making clear that robustness, scale and real-world deployment still require further work. It is a strong example of how applied research at JADS can grow from a concrete use case into knowledge that helps shape the next generation of data-driven urban systems. Within the LOKET project, EngD trainee Arya Tri Prabawa has continues Daniel’s work on the Digital Twin project, designing and implementing a construction logistics traffic impact simulation on a digital twin of the city of Gemeente ‘s-Hertogenbosch.
Extra material
Read the scientific publication here: Open and Extendable Urban Digital Twins: Real-Time Data Pipelines and Conversational Interfaces for Sustainable Cities – ScienceDirect
About the researchers
Daniel Wondyifraw previously worked on this research as an EngD trainee at JADS and is now a freelance Data and Analytics Engineer at his own company DataTwinLabs. Jos van Hillegersberg is Academic Director at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science and co-author of the publication.
