Building a Collaborative Foundation for Australian Urban Digital Twins: Enhancing Interoperability as the First Step

Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) offer effective enablers to addressing key Australian urban challenges, including climate change, energy transition and demographic transformation. UDTs' fit-for-purpose digital representations of the urban environment in 3- and 4-D, along with real-time data acquisition and analytical and modelling capabilities enable comprehending complex urban phenomena across time and space, allowing researchers, planners, and policymakers to create better-informed decisions. However, effective implementation and application of UDTs in Australia are hindered by absence of standardised and coordinated approaches for accessing, exchanging, integrating, governing, and utilizing the wide range of available data and tools. This challenge results in time-consuming and costly processes, limiting the effective use and integration of UDTs. Moreover, complexity of customised workarounds hinders the seamless updating, adaptation, and governance of UDTs. Collaboration is needed among Australian industries, academia, and governments to develop and evaluate standards, technologies, policies, and procedures. By assessing, designing and refining international best practices, we can promote interoperability in Australian UDTs holistically. This approach allows making knowledge assets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, enabling effective utilization by both humans and machines, while maximizing the use of existing solutions. This session will feature an interactive discussion among AURIN, OGC, CSIRO Data61, CSDILA, AGLDWG, FrontierSI and the audience. Lessons from national and international projects will be shared, emphasizing the significance of seamless interoperability for successful UDTs. We will discuss state-of-the-art technologies and standards for UDT implementation in open, secure, and scalable environments. This collaborative approach contributes to establishing a national consortium dedicated to advancing Australian UDTs.