Uncovering the challenges of urban digital twins: Identifying and ranking the barriers to operating digital twins in cities

To encourage discussion of the challenges hindering the design and implementation of digital twins, the authors have ranked them based on a systematic literature review combined with an expert survey.

Challenges of urban digital twins: A systematic review and a Delphi expert survey

Many challenges to operate digital twins remain, hindering their design and implementation, and are rarely discussed. Furthermore, issues of social and legal nature are often overlooked. We identify the challenges of operating digital twins in the urban context through a bifurcated and multi-dimensional approach: a systematic literature...

3D building metrics for urban morphology

Urban morphology is important in a broad range of investigations across the fields of city planning, transportation, climate, energy, and urban data science. Characterising buildings with a set of numerical metrics is fundamental to studying the urban form. Despite the rapid developments in 3D geoinformation science, and the growing 3D data...

3dfier: automatic reconstruction of 3D city models

Three-dimensional city models are essential to assess the impact that environmental factors will have on citizens, because they are the input to several simulation and prediction software. Examples of such environmental factors are noise (Stoter et al., 2008), wind (Garcı́a-Sánchez et al., 2014), air pollution (Ujang et al., 2013), and...

Reference study of IFC software support: The GeoBIM benchmark 2019—Part I

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), the buildingSMART open standard for BIM, is underused with respect to its promising potential, since, according to the experience of practitioners and researchers working with BIM, issues in the standard’s implementation and use prevent its effective use. Nevertheless, a systematic investigation of these...

How might an Lod Logic Framework Help to Bridge the 3D Cadastre Research-to-Practice Gap?: A Proposal for a Level of Implementation Framework

During the past decade, hundreds of research papers have been published on the challenge of registering multi-level properties in land administration and cadastral registrations. In addition, many pilots have been carried out to show potential solutions. However, fundamental and standardised solutions for 3D cadastre are still rare. In this...

GeoBIM benchmark: ISPRS Scientific initiative 2019 - Final report

In both research and practice, data interoperability is considered essential to support a rising number of applications that need data from different domains. Therefore, standard data formats and models are developed by standardization organizations such as Open Geospatial Consortium (for the Geo domain)<br/>and buildingSMART (for the BIM domain...

Reference study of CityGML software support: The GeoBIM benchmark 2019—Part II

OGC CityGML is an open standard for 3D city models intended to foster interoperability and support various applications. However, through our practical experience and discussions with practitioners, we have noticed several problems related to the implementation of the standard and the use of standardized data. Nevertheless, a systematic...

Linking Persistent Scatterers to the Built Environment Using Ray Tracing on Urban Models

Persistent scatterers (PSs) are coherent measurement points obtained from time series of satellite radar images, which are used to detect and estimate millimeter-scale displacements of the terrain or man-made structures. However, associating these measurement points with specific physical objects is not straightforward, which hampers the...

Considerations for a Contemporary 3D Cadastre for our Times

A significant number of studies has been carried out to establish 3D cadastre solutions to improve the registration of multi-level property. Since the inception of research on 3D cadastres (about 20 years ago), the world around us has changed significantly and this also partly changes the context regarding 3D cadastre: technology (e.g....

First 3D Cadastral Registration of Multi-level Ownerships Rights in the Netherlands

This paper reports on the first 3D cadastral registration of multi-level ownerships rights in the Netherlands, which was accomplished in March 2016. It is the result of a study that was undertaken from 2013 to 2015 to determine how insight about multi-level ownership can be provided in 3D by the cadastral registration. The solution was sought...