"I Want to Teach About Digital Twins...so what do I do?"
At the Education Summit this year, @MichaelGould and I hosted a session titled ‘Demystifying Digital Twins’. The goal of the session was to discuss what digital twins are from a geospatial perspective, hear what the interests from the community have been, and to discuss the availability of resources for teaching about digital twins.
Some of the hottest topics of conversation at the session were: “What the heck is a digital twin?”, “What makes it different from a model?”, “Does it include real-time data?”, “Is it just a buzzword?”
For some great articles that start to dive into this discussion/definition – please see:
- ASU – A Specialist Meeting on Digital Twins Workshop – Final Report: https://sgsup.asu.edu/node/9358
- Geospatial Digital Twins Offer Unmatched Clarity for Complex Systems: https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/blog/geospatial-digital-twin-enhances-understanding/
- Digital Twins at Scale: https://www.forbes.com/sites/esri/2023/03/13/digital-twins-at-scale/
From the ASU meeting listed above, the participants found little disagreement with the following definition:
A digital twin is a virtual representation of the real world, including physical objects, processes, relationships, and behaviors (Esri)
As was also the case at the ASU workshop, a big part of the discussion at the Education Summit was simply that a digital twin could be a lot of different things. A digital twin for Syracuse NY will differ a great deal from one for Singapore. The question for us was: For any city or location… what is the technology that students can learn about that supports the vision for building a digital twin?
The goal of this post is not to dive into the definition of a digital twin – but to help those that are interested in teaching about digital twins – understand where they can get started.
Not to replicate work that has already been done – here is a great summary of the technology that can be used to support various aspects of a digital twin:
- Esri Digital Twin Technology and Resources: https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/media/brochures/digital-twin-technology-resource.pd...
The aim of the following resources is to provide a list of lessons, training, and labs. All of this content is broken down into a digital twin framework and linked to in the appropriate ‘bucket’.
- Data Capture: the creation of an accurate geospatial model or foundation
- Integration: combining information from multiple data sources and sensor networks
- Real time & Visualization: presenting information visually
- Analysis & prediction: using traditional statistics, spatial statistics, and GeoAI to interrogate the data
- Sharing & collaboration: building applications and tools to operationalize the resulting information
Data Capture
- Extract 3D buildings from Lidar: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/extract-3d-buildings-from-lidar-data/
- This lesson starts with lidar and building footprints (both data sets are pretty easy to come by for most locales)
- Construct realistic buildings with multipatch editing: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/construct-realistic-buildings-with-multipatch-editing/
- This lesson walks through a process of building multi-patch/3D buildings. This is a more manual workflow – but provides some good tips/tricks if students want to ‘skin’ buildings
- Reality mapping with ArcGIS: https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/5ee00f8fefb9bc0b7003ae36/reality-mapping-using-arcgis/
- Includes getting started lessons for SiteScan and Drone2Map
Integration
- Create a data pipeline: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/data-pipelines/latest/get-started/create-a-pipeline.htm
- Data Pipelines is a new functionality that just landed in ArcGIS Online (spring 2023). It provides a great way to teach about static or real-time data ingestion
- ArcGIS Arcade Fundamentals: https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/60353c60303e2a7692f9da01/arcgis-arcade-fundamentals/
- Arcade provides a really nice way to ‘merge/join’ data from multiple datasets
Real time & Visualization
- Living Atlas: https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/
- I like this because it provides a pretty ‘low bar’ for getting started with some basic real-time feeds. Students can easily search for data of interest and add it into a map/etc.
- Advanced formatting: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-advanced-formatting-in-arcgis-dashboards/
- This is a good one as well – a bit more involved – but shows some of the power of real-time alerting and also combines power outage data (very relevant)
Analysis & prediction
- Climate proof a neighborhood: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/climate-proof-a-neighborhood-with-arcgis-urban/
- This has a nice lesson that takes you through getting a model setup in ArcGIS Urban. This could hopefully show students what the data needs are for building a local dataset.
- Performing Sales Data Analysis with ArcGIS Insights Online: https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/6448298a821bdb2fe8bc3385/performing-sales-data-analysis-with-a...
- This lesson could have also been added to the ‘sharing’ section – but the emphasis on explorational data analysis is what encouraged me to include it here.
Sharing & collaboration
- Make a dashboard to monitor wildfires: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/make-a-dashboard-to-monitor-wildfires/
- This lesson is only 20 min. long – and I think it’s a great one. It could easily be expanded upon with other data feeds, etc.
- Share decision-ready data: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/share-decision-ready-data/
- This lessons explores the use of ArcGIS Hub to share data and work with a local community
Conclusion
I am sure I missed a lot. If there are additional lessons or resources that you are using to teach about digital twins, please let us know! Please provide additional resources in the comments below.