Human-centered digital twins have a long way to go

A growing body of research is questioning the use of urban digital twins for decision-making in community resilience planning. A 2022 literature review by a group of scholars at Texas A&M University highlighted three strategic challenges: the limits of digital twins to integrate diverse data for complex decision-making; the lack of clear goals for using digital twins to engage people in participatory planning; and knowledge gaps about how to integrate physical, environmental, and social models inside twins.

These gaps indicate a growing need for research and development of urban digital twins that integrate diverse data sources, advance user-friendly visualization tools, and incorporate human-centered behavior analysis. Lacking this knowledge, it is likely that commercial and institutional adoption of urban digital twins will frustrate users and under-deliver, generate resistance among key stakeholders, or both.