Developing Data Requirements for City-Level Digital Twins: Stakeholder Perspective

Abstract

Advances in city-level digital twins (CDTs) have been proposed to enable smarter, more sustainable, and resilient cities across diverse urban management scenarios for a portfolio of buildings and infrastructure in the built environment. However, implementing CDTs faces challenges due to the lack of defined data requirements (DRs) necessary for establishing a common data environment (CDE). This issue primarily arises from insufficient attention to the social and organizational aspects, particularly the complex web of stakeholder roles and their requirements, which hinders the establishment of DRs for collecting heterogeneous data sources before designing and developing a CDT. This study aims to address stakeholder engagement and stakeholder requirements (SRs) in the CDE by establishing stakeholder-driven DRs for CDT uses. To achieve this goal, 54.5 h of semistructured expert interviews were conducted in two rounds, and 22 worldwide CDT cases were summarized. The key research findings include: (1) the current CDT development and operation business model, key and overlooked stakeholders, and information dissemination directions identified through social network analysis (SNA) at network, actor, and tie levels; (2) the existing SRs analyzed using a strategic, tactical, and operational categorization framework to guide CDT development and application; and (3) a general DR framework for data source collection and a road map for generating use case–specific DRs involving stakeholders and their SRs, developed by analyzing the influences of stakeholder engagement on DRs. These outcomes can streamline the data organization processes for establishing a CDE for CDTs. Ultimately, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can benefit from this study by understanding the organizational and technological challenges in establishing CDTs caused by stakeholder and SRs issues. The established DRs can be adopted and adapted as guidelines and principles to assist in developing a more open CDE for diverse organizations, such as governmental bodies and asset owner enterprises, ultimately accelerating the digitalization process for smarter cities. This study points out the importance of stakeholder engagement and data requirements for data source collection when implementing digital technology projects such as city-level digital twins in enterprises or governmental departments for urban management. Practitioners in asset owner enterprises and city governance departments can use the research findings in this study to develop a strategic execution plan or policy for city-level digital twins implementation with a clear landscape of who should be involved in this implementation, how to collect stakeholder requirements effectively, what and how to collect required data sources and manage the sources properly in the long-term run. Practitioners in the provider organizations can benefit from the research findings by learning the crucial stakeholder requirements, providing more efficient data management solutions of data sources, and establishing harmonious stakeholder collaboration environments. Overall, this study can help practitioners to bring practical benefits of city-level digital twins for urban management to their organizations, moving beyond the concept of city-level digital twins as mere “one-shot” experiments.