IPPODAMO: A digital twin support for smart cities facility management

The steady deployment of IoT is paving the road toward concrete implementations of the smart city concept, allowing public/private institutions to sense and model (near) real-time digital replicas of physical processes and environments. This Digital Twin (DT) could be used proactively, as a decision support system, providing insights into possible optimizations of processes in a smart city context. In this article, we present the design and main building blocks of a DT solution for the Urban Facility Management (UFM) process in the metropolitan area of Bologna, Italy. The Interactive Planning Platform for city District Adaptive Maintenance Operations (IPPODAMO) is a proof of concept solution consisting of a (distributed) multi-layer geographical system, fed with heterogeneous data sources originating from different urban data providers. The data are subject to continuous refinements and algorithmic processes, used to quantify and predict near-to-long term evolution of the urban activity level, exploited for planning purposes, scheduling urban maintenance operations and interventions.