 Hi, this is IntergeoTV and welcome to this Intergeo Tech Talk. The aim of our Tech Talks is to make technology tangible and to present its potential. So let's get to know people who are deeply involved in the subject and can pass on their experience with us. Let's talk with people who are responsible for developing technologies and powering organizations to deal with their challenges. And our topic today is digital twins and their incredible possibilities for municipalities and administrations. And a digital twin is the basis for almost infinite possibilities and applications. And the basis for this is called GIS. And I'm really happy because with me are Marco Priski, Chief Technology Officer from Esri, Germany. Hi and welcome, Marco. And you can also see here on our panel Dr. Konrad, Wenzel, his director, Esri Research and Development Center in Stuttgart, Germany. So what they both have in common is a passion for GIS and a visionary view of the digital representation of our cities and municipalities. And at this point of course also welcome Konrad. So let's start with Marco. And I think, yeah you can give us an overview to the digital twins and do they really have the potential to lead cities and municipalities into a sustainable future or is the digital twin in your words or opinion just old wine in new bottles? That's a good question, yeah. So from my point of view, first of all, if you're talking about digital twins, it's not just about the visualization. So they help us to understand dependencies and the interaction of all the assets and processes, infrastructures. By the way, everywhere in our life, not only in cities or in smart cities. So in the real world, everything is connected. Everything is independent with many other things around. And let's take a look to a little or a small example. If we are trying to plan and build a new bridge, then it's a complex infrastructure itself. But it needs a lot of analysis for the underground, for the geology, for impact on the environment. And this during the planning period, but also for the time after. So the bridge can have many countries, not only maybe for a road can be structured for other utilities. And it has an impact for let's say for a larger scale. So the traffic flow is changing. The planning has to reflect all the other things around the bridge as well, especially in cities. Let's come back to the original topic. They are the dependencies and then the behaviors between the assets are much stronger. Everything is in a very small space. It's running in very short times. So the only way to manage all the changes, all the plannings within a city, I think, is a digital way. And we have some examples on the slide on this. So we have to talk about the planning and the operation of buildings and infrastructures. We also talk about master planning for the city. So remember the limited living space we have to deal with or the climate of the city. If you're talking about green infrastructures or also blue infrastructures, if you're talking about water things. And yeah, many things more. So for monitoring, we have real time situational awareness for public transportation, for parking management, security and others. But digital trends also provides an appropriate set of applications for participation, for communication with external stakeholders for the exchange among engineers, architects, and even with the public. So we need a lot of things that can be done with digital trends. And for this, they need a set of full functionality. So they need tools for building and operating data sets, for having updates in the data, for analysis of things, for real time capabilities. And today, the technology is ready for that. That's the big difference to former times. And that's the reason why I say no, it's not only old wine, it's more than that. We have a lot of tools and capabilities in the technology to really make the digital world in the same or react in the same way as the real world. That's that's a big thing for me. Yeah, that's cool. It's a valuable technology. And it's, yeah, it's very, very important for our sustainable future. And Marco, for you from Esri as a GIS company, and GIS, of course, is the core of a digital city, as you also just explained. So just explain us again, in a few sentences, why GIS and your information on the other hand, or compared to each other, are so fundamental to the digital twin and the complex data tool they are using. Yeah, I think complexity is just a good keyword for that. So everything in the real world has has a place and the time where it happens. And it's influenced by a lot of things from the environment by by terrain, by weather, by neighborhoods. So we need to understand things in the digital space in the same way as they are in the real world. And I often say in 4D, not only in 3D, but in 4D with a focus on the time when when things happens. And GIS can make this fusion of all the dimensions of all the the behaviors that we are talked about. And GIS can connect to the systems with the data that brings us all the details on one common base or one common ground. This is the spatial and timely reference that we need between all the data. So the challenge is to to model the complexity from the real world in the digital space. And we have four fundamental models that we are talking about related with GIS. The one thing is the landscape information model. We have a slide on this as well. And we can see this. So we are talking about topography, terrain, the soil, land cover and all the other things. We have also building information models where we have much more detailed information about infrastructures, complex buildings and underground things as well. And the third thing is network information models. We see we have not only road networks, we have also utilities, we have electricity parts, we have oil and gas pipelines and much more. And each of these networks are very special. It has a lot of attributes that we have to model if we want to hit all the details in the digital world in the same way as they are in the real world. And this complexity is the modern of this complexity. That's the big capability that GIS can do for building and maintaining digital twins. You're talking about connected models or connected twins. So you are not talking about one digital twin for one city. So they are all working together with their technology behind that. And what exactly does that mean? Yeah, let's take a look at an example. If we are talking about in the utility company, then they have to focus on their own assets, their networks, especially the utility grids and all the infrastructures directly attached to the grid. Transportation planners have their own view on the transportation infrastructure and it's not the same. So if we are going through all the details and we can see that there are a lot of views or parts of digital twins in the world around us. And the big thing is to connect the data, the foundations or the views on the specific twins together to have a comprehensive approach for coming planning or for coming understanding it. And the connect is not only one dimension. So we have the technology aspect. We have to use systems that are able to connect to each other to exchange data services and applications. But the connect is also a question of user management, authorizations to have the connect to and not only the view but also the rights to use and to analyze data from other from external stakeholders. And we have to see the processes to ensure that the right people are working with the right data. So we are talking about single source of truth. Who is responsible? Who can share the data to each other? Who has the responsibility to bring the data into the business process of all the other stakeholders? But this is all together. This is the key for success with the connection of the data, the services, the applications. At the end of the story, the connect of all the digital twins first. Thank you very much for this introduction into your work and your passion for digital twins. And yeah, let's continue with Konrad and Konrad just to bring it into a short introduction. You bring the world as we can see it with our eyes or from above into the digital twin so that everybody can really imagine or work with it or see how it works. So you combine the photogrammetry with the GIS and in this way you make the digital twin tangible even for non-experts. So yeah, explain us exactly what you are doing with that and what's the aim of that work for people or companies making possible to work with that what you create there? Yeah, imagery has of course four GIS and also in the whole mapping space been always so important, right? Imagery is so easy to understand, it is so intuitive and at the same time so rich, right? Imaging sensors capture the world as they look today. They make it also intuitive to see exactly what we see today and in a GIS context, author photos from aerial imagery have been used of course a long time as well along with rest of the data. They give context, they also add some detail, right, that you can understand also when they are not part of the model data and with that really enrich the way how we can actually use information and generate GIS. Modern photogrammetry technology like we also develop at Esri and also like in the R&D Center in Stuttgart enables us now to take aerial imagery and turn this into 3D meshes fully automatically. So 3D meshes add like the third dimension to it. So giving this photorealistic canvas in some sense to make data more understandable, to also reach people who are not familiar with reading schematic data but also to maybe capture detail in this relevant and certain applications. Look at this example when we are seeing of course aerial imagery overlaid with GIS information like right here for the city of Frankfurt which is very common for many people. Like now in 2D we have some schematic information that we can access like here in ArcGIS online and when we add the 3D canvas to it like the 3D mesh which is created fully automatically you can of course see that it adds an entire different dimension to interact with the data. Makes it much more simple in a way, much more intuitive and with that also reaches more people. You just talked about integrating data is working automatically or is easy to use and how can cities and municipalities continue to use their data sets in the digital twin or how complicated is it to link the data sets which are existing already existing into such a digital twin. This is an excellent question because for many organizations this is the big question today right having different data streams usually recording data in 2D and they are asking themselves like what can I do to actually go to 3D to also enable applications which need 3D for example simulation as one example or anything that needs more context in 3D and to overcome this challenge like we try at S3 to develop the technology in a way that we can use heterogeneous data streams like in real time right as what you saw before like it's all done in real time so the GDS information in 2D is just merged in real time with this 3D mesh and the information together makes this interaction possible without actually changing the one or the other data and this is really key because if we have 2D data and an organization already then we also want to update it in a cycle that this organization or this department of the organization actually would like it to do versus maybe the 3D canvas that we just saw the 3D mesh gets updated every year and every department as Marco said it so nicely right has a different view on the data they connect their data they link the data for example from the utility space into this single source of truth which is this commitment of all departments to work together and so what do you do like when S3 is to actually enable tools like in visualization to in real time interact with this data together to create an intuitive canvas for each application individually depending on what their application needs so this sounds really good and Marco what do you think or what do you guess right now is 2022 when we switch over to 2030 for example will administrations in Germany or in the rest of the world Europe manage their cities and our everyday lives with digital twins and with connected dashboards or will it even be quicker or because I think the technology is already there at intergeal and the conferences we hear this since several years I think about seven or eight years we're talking about digital twins and how they can help improve cities and make things more sustainable and work with more efficiency so what's your prediction from S3's view? I think the importance with regular and the original question yes I'm pretty sure we will use additional twins much more in also in our daily life so we see virtual realities is becoming more and more powerful we see AI based applications they help us to record data to evaluate changes in many processes and services we will realize and react to changes in the digital world based on dashboards faster than we ever could in the real world so that's that's my opinion so everyone will access the digital twin in real time not only via a smartphone but also with variables and these are just not nice to have applications in the future I think it will accompany with our everyday life so when we are searching parking space in the city of tomorrow or we are looking for the next car share we're talking about navigation and not only by car like with all the other transportation or even if you're talking about citizen services the interaction with the citizens offices I think everywhere we will see that parts of the data for the digital twin will help to automate those processes for us in our daily life so the offices will open their digital data sets their digital twins to improve those processes towards these interactions with the citizens that's that's like not only my guess I think it's motion okay thank you Marco and yeah Conrad one last question also to you in that context we just heard some areas of application from from Marco as we all know for searching a parking space for example using navigation systems so which areas of application for the digital twin are closest to your heart for me like the especially better decisions are like the most important education so seeing like a digital twin like a platform of better collaboration of spatial decision making Marco said so nicely everything that we do has a space and a time component to it and it happens and if we think about decisions especially in complex environments where many people live together where many dependencies occur then being informed and being able to get everyone with a stakeholder informed is a challenging task maps and digital twins can actually help us that and they do today already I believe that many cities already do a digital twin today by committing to this single source of truth by maintaining that probability and it's just like about to elevate this infrastructure and to grow together in these organizations to be better in communicating complex information to make better decisions that also hold for a longer period of time but also to react to change that is happening so quickly as we know so this is for me the most exciting aspect to empower all these different departments to do collaborative decision making in an informed way better these are perfect words I think for closing this tech talk which was really exciting that you gave us these insights into the future of city administration for example today and tomorrow and how we will use and profit from the technology of the connected digital twins and yeah I think they will do a lot for us and hopefully lead to decisions being made on even better and above all more a uniform basis so thank you very much to the two of you I enjoyed that tech talk very much so this was Marco Prisky and Konrad Wenzel I say thank you and hope you will join us at interview 2022 and we see all us at Essen Germany thank you and goodbye