 The Opinion Leader Talk here at InterGU 2019 in Stuttgart with Robert Mankowski, Vice President of Digital Cities Business Unit at Bandler Systems right after your keynote at the conference here. Thanks for joining us. Good morning. It's my pleasure. Thank you. The Digital Advanced City. Trusted information whenever and wherever needed. Your keynote a few minutes ago. First, why is it so important for cities to become digital? Can you give us a short overview? Absolutely. Yeah, it's important for cities to become digital and it's important for us as a society because today most of us live in cities. 55% of the global population lives in cities today and this is expected to grow to nearly 70% or 68% in 30 years. Now, a lot of that growth will be in Asia and in Africa, but right here in Europe already 74% of the population lives in cities and is expected to grow. There's very few cities that are going to be getting smaller and cities are challenged to deal with the populations that they already have. For those of us that live in cities, we know about congestion and pollution and noise and all sorts of issues that the infrastructure systems are challenged to deal with. And the growth in the population is only going to make that more challenging. And so digitalization is seen as a key strategy for dealing with those challenges. And what are the key factors on the way on this transformation for a city to a digital city? Yeah, one of the key factors is actually not technology at all. The key factor is a culture, a way of thinking about how to operate a city. It's about having data to inform your decision-making process and it's about having workflows that leverage the data. What we talk about is creating a digital twin of a city and using the digital twin to inform your decision-making processes that ultimately will lead to better societal outcomes, better environmental outcomes, economic outcomes, safety and health outcomes, etc. in the city. Can you explain what is a digital twin? Is it just a 3D model of the reality? No, it is not just a 3D model. It typically starts with a 3D model, what we refer to as digital context. At Bentley Systems we refer to digital context. And for a city, this would be a 3D model of the entire city. This can be created using automated photogrammetry techniques, so using lidar and photos to create, reconstruct a 3D model, but it's more than just a 3D model. It's not just the image or the view of a city. It's about integrating the different data sources that a city already has today into that 3D model and using the 3D model as a way to visualize the data, to integrate the data and combine the data to gain new insights in how the infrastructure is operated and how you can better plan, design and construct new infrastructure. Do you have some use cases for us? You had examples from Scandinavia and your kids. Yes, I had a few Scandinavian examples, so in one case it's the city of Gothenburg, which is about 600,000 inhabitants today, but expected to grow by 150,000 new people in the city in the next 15 years. And so they're looking at how to deal with that kind of growth in their housing and in their transportation infrastructure. In this particular case, they used a digital twin of the city to plan and visualize a new metro tunnel. It's about an 8 kilometer long tunnel underneath the central district of the city with three stations. And they were using the digital twin to visualize that and to share that information with the city. In another example, a Swedish example, they were crowdsourcing ideas for urban planning. So having a digital twin that was accessible to the citizens to give ideas about how they felt the city should be improved. So this is, again, coming back to that way of thinking of not just planning as a top-down activity, but as a bottom-up sort of crowdsourced activity to make the city more livable. Yeah, there are many examples. We can talk about urban resilience in terms of dealing with flood events and how to plan to mitigate the risk associated with that. Yeah, there's just great examples of how digital twins are being used. We talked about challenges for the cities. Let's talk about the challenges for you, for Bentley, in helping the cities in this process. Yeah, of course there are challenges for us as well. What we're trying to do at Bentley Systems is enable the creation of digital twins by providing software services, cloud services, and also desktop and server-based software that really enable the creation and use of digital twins. But one of the big challenges is that you're trying to integrate a lot of different data sources into the digital twin. And these data sources exist in silos today, and departmental silos within a city, or organizational silos, maybe some of the data isn't even owned by the city. It's private infrastructure that's operating within the city. And one of the big challenges is that these data systems were created with very specific purposes in mind and very different purposes in mind. And so integrating that data is one of the biggest challenges that we have in enabling and creating a digital twin for a city. Robert Malkowski, thank you and have a good time here. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you for watching. Bye.