Creating a Foundation for Spatial Digital Twins in Data-Scarce Regions Through Open-Source Solutions

This chapter explored the extent that open-source solutions can help generate a spatial Digital Twin of cities in data-scarce regions—in this instance, Honiara, the capital city of Solomon Islands. City-model spatial Digital Twins are defined as a virtual twin of an existing city that has a channel of live data between the virtualised environment and physical world. The conceptual minimum requirements were investigated and whether the available data could define the city-model as a spatial Digital Twin. A city-model was generated with an Application Programming Interface (API) installed to communicate updating data between the virtual twin and the physical world. The minimum requirements, a virtual twin, the physical twin represented and a channel of live data, were met and successfully created using open-source GIS hosted with cloud-computing tools. The output was generic, the live data limited to global weather information rather than Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data. The spatial Digital Twin used open-source data except for the Digital Surface Model (DSM) representing Honiara’s surface elevation. The investigation indicated that regions experiencing data scarcity can generate a city-model and implement a flow of updating data onto the model meets the minimum requirements of a spatial Digital Twin. The chapter’s contribution conceptualises the minimum threshold for defining a spatial Digital Twin and its expected output and function. Further study topics highlighted is exploring what can be considered optimal features for a robust spatial Digital Twin, methods of obtaining highly detailed spatial data to improve its appearance, and sourcing different types of live information from areas that receive limited coverage. This will create a foundation for developing future spatial Digital Twins.