Digital Twins for Smart Cities: Benefits, Enabling Technologies, Applications, and Challenges

Digital twins have immense potential to enhance the planning, management, and optimization of smart cities across diverse domains. A digital twin represents a real-world physical component through an integrated multiphysics, multiscale, and probabilistic simulation. By leveraging digital twins, smart cities can visualize designs in 3D, conduct virtual tests and simulations, and facilitate configuration, monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics. Consequently, digital twins can contribute significantly to the development, sustainability, and maintenance of smart cities. In this paper, we explore the potential of digital twins in shaping smart cities to the next level. We highlight some key benefits associated with the adoption of digital twins in smart city contexts. We discuss the networking and communication technologies that provide connectivity support for digital twins. Furthermore, we provide insightful discussions on the role of digital twins in various domains of smart cities. Finally, we present some open challenges along with recommendations.