An Urban Digital Twin is a dynamic digital model of a city, fed by data collected from the city itself, and capable of faithfully reproducing the city behaviour through the use of advanced modelling, data science, and AI techniques. One of the key foreseen applications of Urban Digital Twins is to predict the evolution of the city, including the effects and impacts of external changes (eg, climate change) and internal processes (eg, urban transition policies and incentives).
A challenge for the development of Urban Digital Twins is that cities are systems-of-systems, with complex interactions between physical, organisational, and social dimensions, as well as between the physical world and the digital world. Novel modeling and simulation techniques are necessary to develop Urban Digital Twins able to manage this complexity and produce reliable predictions.
The candidate will be requested to contribute to this research area, and in particular to work on advanced modeling and simulation frameworks for Urban Digital Twins. The expected contribution of the candidate is twofold: first, developing a novel framework of new analytical methods for modeling and simulation in the Urban Digital Twin; second, assessing the validation of the proposed framework on real-world scenarios concerning the adoption of Digital Twin by Italian cities.
Besides the requirements established by the rules of the IECS school, preferential characteristics for candidates for this scholarship are:
– Master degree in Computer/Data Science, Mathematics, Physics, Electrical Engineering, Communication Engineering, or equivalents;
– Knowledge in artificial intelligence, statistical and machine learning, complex systems, agent-based modeling and simulation.