Mirror worlds: Germany's digital twin is growing!

Dr. Jürgen Dold reports on the technological progress in creating and updating digital mirror worlds, which contribute substantially to the Digital Twin of Germany. The Digital Twin of Germany project started in 2021 with a pilot in the Hamburg metropolitan region. The first Germany-wide land use maps for industrial applications were generated from a consistent aerial image dataset provided using AI methods. The benefits of digital, 3D semantic city models were demonstrated in various German cities.

The experiences show the great benefits offered by Germany's Digital Twin, which forms the backbone for a sustainable development of Smart Cities and Smart Nation. The Digital Twin is an excellent basis for a future-oriented digital transformation of Germany.

A unified Digital Twin of Germany, which is available at all levels and to all players from the government and private sector, can unlock the full potential of technologically possible digitisation. The Digital Twin is the ideal basis for making forecasts, for monitoring/modeling ecosystems and for identifying alternative courses of action. These potentials will result in considerable improvements for the state, the economy and, above all, citizens in the real world.

Basically, digital twins mirror the physical world and physical processes into a digital world. The basis of a digital twin of Germany is spatially accurate and homogeneous geoinformation of high quality and timeliness. To achieve this, the physical world is precisely and efficiently captured with sensors from space, from the air, from the street and indoors. This consistent and precise data basis can be updated cost-effectively using state-of-the-art technology.

Users can integrate additional static and dynamic data such as cadastral directories, weather data, Copernicus services, news feeds and real-time traffic data. The Digital Twin of Germany serves as a central tool for a wide range of organisations, administrative units and authorities responsible for spatial planning, public safety, crisis and disaster management, precision agriculture, forest and water management, and environmental protection.