The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the UDigiT-Doctor project of HFT Stuttgart and the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (BHT) for the quality assurance of 3D city and landscape models. The aim: better infrastructure planning.
How does urban greening affect energy demand in buildings or the urban climate? What needs to be taken into account when building new lines in existing neighbourhoods? And how much noise and particulate matter could new urban projects generate? Questions like these can be answered using Urban Digital Twins (UDT). These are 3D city and landscape models that can be used to simulate different situations. However, the data base is diverse, data formats are not compatible and cross-sectoral interactions are difficult to map. While considerable progress has been made in collecting data for these models, there is a lack of tools for quality assurance.
Researchers from the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences and the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (BHT), as well as several industrial partners, are hoping to change this - with the help of around €700,000 in funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research's "FH Kooperativ" programme.
In the UDigiT-Doctor project, Prof. Dr. Volker Coors and his Berlin colleague Prof. Dr. Margitta Pries are developing software to validate and repair urban digital twins and planning data for complex infrastructure projects. The aim is to secure the basic properties of urban digital twins for different applications, so that the improved models can be further processed in existing applications. To this end, they are building on the results of their two predecessor projects, CityDoctor and CityDoctor2, in which they developed methods for testing and repairing data from individual building models.
Their smart city research approach is also of interest to associated partners: the Open Geospatial Consortium Europe and the cities of Stuttgart and Leverkusen are supporting the project. The results will also be incorporated into national and international standards. The project will run for three years, starting on 1 April 2024.
