Wiesbaden: An Urban Digital Twin for all user groups and requirements

Building on newly established structures and the desire to break new ground

Wiesbaden has set itself the goal of leveraging the potential of an Urban Digital Twin for administration, planning and citizen participation. The following report shows how the city has approached this project strategically, organisationally and technically. It highlights goals, approaches, technologies used and communication strategies, and provides an outlook on the next steps.

Wiesbaden already had an extensive geodata base before the project began: a 3D building model had been available since 2006 and has been hosted by Virtual City Systems (VCS) since 2015. In addition to the 3D model, a geodata infrastructure containing extensive 2D and 3D data has been successfully established over the past decades. Wiesbaden was already using a 2D geoportal for the web-based visualisation of spatial information. However, with new requirements, particularly those arising from the newly established Smart City unit, the topic of Urban Digital Twins came into sharper focus – as an opportunity to further develop and better integrate existing structures.

An important basis for getting started was the promotion of smart municipalities and regions in the ‘Starke Heimat Hessen’ (Strong Home Hesse) programme of the Hessian Ministry of Digitalisation and Innovation. This enabled the first technical and organisational steps to be implemented.

Wiesbaden‘s Digital Twin is aimed at different target groups: administration, politics, experts and citizens. The aim is to provide data-based support for complex urban development processes, use resources more efficiently and, at the same time, involve the urban community. The twin covers topics such as mobility, climate, environment, social issues and culture.

One concrete example is the integrated construction site overview. It provides transparent insight into ongoing and planned works across the city and supports both internal coordination and public communication.

A key principle was connectivity to existing structures. The city of Wiesbaden was already using solutions from the VCS portfolio, including hosting of the 3D building model. Building on this foundation, various components of the VC Suite are now in use:

• VC Publisher for data preparation and provision
• VC Map as a public and internal visualisation front end
• VC Database for consistent storage of semantic city model data
• VC Warehouse for 3D data conversion into common industry formats
• VC Story for interactive content preparation

The public platform is operated on external infrastructure, while sensitive data remains within the city‘s IT system.

A Digital Twin only reveals its full potential when it is actively communicated and explained. The city of Wiesbaden relies on a wide range of communication formats – from press releases and screencasts to workshops with schools and universities. Feedback from these formats is collected and used for further development.

A key aspect of the project‘s success in Wiesbaden to date has been the cooperation between the Smart City department and the Geoinformation department. This was made possible by a shared understanding of goals, openness to cross-departmental cooperation and a willingness to further develop existing administrative structures.

The Digital Twin is being further developed in close coordination with the specialist departments of the city administration, municipal companies and external partners. The focus is on the following three areas:

1. Municipal heating planning
2. Mobility and traffic flow
3. Integration of external open data via the Dynamic Layers plugin (data catalogues from the EU, the federal government, the state, etc.)

Another tool expected to play a central role in Wiesbaden is VC Story: it can significantly simplify the editorial preparation of topics for specific target groups or with a specialised focus, making them easy to understand and interact with.

With its Urban Digital Twin, Wiesbaden combines technical development with organisational cooperation and public communication. The project shows how digitalisation in a municipal context can build on existing structures while also creating new momentum for innovation.