A Smart Zero Carbone City Twin
A Smart Zero Carbone City Twin, to meet cities’ ecological transition and reach carbon neutrality.
Six European capitals, Grand Paris Metropolis, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stavanger and Tallinn, as part of the AI4Cities Consortium, have come together to commission an unprecedented product: the Smart Zero Carbone City Twin, to accelerate and manage cities’ ecological transition.
The Smart Zero Carbone City Twin is a virtual replica of urban mobility, which models users’ mobility patterns and their behavior, so that City transportation executives, planners, elected officials, and citizens can precisely understand the drivers of mobility and assess the CO2 impact of their decisions. They can get measurable answers to questions, such as: What is the impact of transport modal shifts, adding a new public transport line or a new urban perimeter…
The platform is built on artificial intelligence bricks. It is developed by Insight Signals, leader in User Centric Digital Twins, and Urbatis, an internationally recognized specialist in Impact Measurement and Smart Cities.
“INSIGHT SIGNALS uses digital twin technology to analyze and plan urban mobility. The solution is user-centric and aims at recording the daily urban travels to map and evaluate the GHG emissions generated by sector and by travel modes. The objective is to facilitate the strategic decisions to be undertaken towards urban planning.” AI4Cities Consortium
Applied to the case to the Paris Metropolis, the Digital Twin of Urban Decarbonization is virtual replica of each of the 131 municipalities of the Metropolis of its seven million users and their daily transportation flows. It integrates open data as well as data sets provided by municipalities, such as traffic and counting data, or user socio-professional data.
“Starting from available open data, we modeled the transport flows of the Greater Paris Metropolis, users, modes of travel across municipalities, to provide a granular and daily view of transportation, and to simulate the impact of future mobility projects to help decision-making on critical projects, such as Grand Paris Express Line or the implementation of low-carbon traffic zones. The underlying model is extendable to any city, whether larger or smaller“, explains Manuel Ceva, President of Insight Signals.
Cities can thus precisely measure the impact of their – projects and the impact on CO2 emissions. They can also test any mobility scenario before implementing it. In addition, the solution, generic by design, can be reproduced in many activities critical to cities, such as such as energy or food consumption.
“Today, cities struggle with the issue of measuring the full impact of their decisions for a better and more sustainable living environment. Because it is built around a user centric approach, the Smart Zero Carbone City Twin is one of the most relevant tools to address city-led decision making “, explains Hervé Solignac, President of Urbatis.
The Smart Zero Carbone City Twin makes it possible to measure the impact of any project configuration on mobility patterns, CO2 emissions as well as the cost and investments. For example, a test scenario measuring the impact of work from home days versus “normal” days and showed a 7% reduction in CO2 emissions. A key result for a region such as the Greater Paris Metropolis, which must imperatively meet carbon neutrality by 2050.
