Smart City Digital Twin: A System-of-Systems Approach

The concept of smart cities has emerged to battle the problems facing cities from rapid urbanization and mismanagement of resources. In order to monitor and control these large-scale environments such as cities, digital twins were proposed. These digital twins represent a large-scale environment virtually and connect it to the physical world. However, complexity arises when studying these cities. A city is a complex system of interconnected systems, or a system-of-systems (SoS), according to definitions by systems engineering. To understand how SoS can be applied to a smart city digital twin, a literature review is first conducted on SoS applications in construction in order to understand how to apply it to the different parts of a smart city. This paper the proposes a unique view on smart city digital twins by applying the system-of-systems engineering approach to view the cities and thereby understand and model them.