Digital Twin Use Case for Smart, Sustainable Cities

A growing, increasingly urban population with a high ecological footprint is raising the threat of global food insecurity. While sustainable food systems such as mobile plant cultivation units (MPCUs) combined with new digital technologies such as digital twins provide a promising mitigation strategy, cities often differ significantly in terms of available resources as well as climate and infrastructure, making a one-size-fits-all design solution insufficient. A set of digital twin use case scenarios and reference architectures for understanding how to design, manufacture, service, and retire MPCUs in different city contexts provides the first step toward using data-driven digital twins to help address these challenges and promote sustainable cities. This chapter contributes to this effort by advancing a use case scenario where a digital twin is used to automatically grow selected plants in MPCUs by monitoring relevant physical conditions; based on this scenario, a first-level functional architecture for the digital twin is proposed. This proposed architecture shows promise in the light of existing reference architectures for digital twins created for a different domain. Research is continuing on how to design and operate a digital twin in conjunction with an MPCU.