Digital Twin: A City-Scale Flood Imitation Framework

Global warming has been observed for decades, and associated climate change is expected to increase the frequency of rare severe events. In Canada, floods are the costliest climate change-induced disasters. For example, the damage cost due to the 2013 flood in Calgary was around $5 billion. Similar devastating floods occurred in other Canadian regions over the past decade. This demonstrate that the cities in Canada are in need for effective decision support tools that can enable the proper and rapid actions under flood events. However, a city must be replicated either physically or virtually such that the inherited complex nature and interdependence between the city’s subsystems are efficiently captured. Emerging technologies, advanced communication systems, and ongoing software development facilitate the virtual representation of a city in a digital twin. This study lays a framework to devise a city digital twin under flood hazards through the integration of data acquisition systems, hydrology and hydraulic modeling, physical infrastructures and entities, demographic information, and real-time system behavior. To demonstrate the applicability and viability of the framework, a digital twin of the city of Calgary is developed and subsequently calibrated using the historical flood that affected the city in 2013. Digital twins developed based on this framework can be employed to: (1) provide a continuous imitation of hazards affecting the city infrastructures; (2) identify vulnerable locations across the city under hazardous events; (3) enhance the city resilience under climate-induced hazards; and (4) develop reliable preparedness plans and risk mitigation strategies under climate-related hazards.