UrbanTwin: A digital twin for urban infrastructure - Assessing the effectiveness of climate-related policies and actions

Partners: ETHZ, EPFL, EMPA, EAWAG, WSL
Duration: 02/2023 - 02/2025
Funding: external page ETH Board Joint Initiatives
Project Leader: EPFL external page Energy Center, external page CLIMACT, external page CIS, EcoCloud
Project Team: Dr. C. Yaman Evrenosoglu, Dr. Adamantios Marinakis, Nikos Savvapoulos, Dr. Turhan Demiray

Develop and validate an integrated tool to support decision-makers in achieving goals such as the Swiss Energy Strategy 2050 and the vision of climate-adaptive ''sponge cities'' in Switzerland
Model the critical urban infrastructure, such as energy, water, buildings and mobility and their inter-dependencies.
Create a multi-scale digital twin running on a large-scale IT infrastructure.

While planning for how to achieve the CO2 targets and create ''climate-adaptive sponge-cities'' in Switzerland, there is a need for a framework/tool that can tightly integrate energy, water and buildings in an urban environment while incorporating socio-economic factors and human behavior based on data collection, integration of dominant techniques across disciplines using artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML)
Lack of user-friendly and accessible tools for various stakeholders to consider the trade-offs for each future energy scenario