DUET Local Digital Twin named Best Enabling Technology at World Smart City Awards

The H2020 funded project DUET, Europe’s first local digital twin project for evidence-based policy making is the winner of the 2021 ‘Enabling Technologies Award’ presented by the Smart Cities Expo and World Congress. The award provides global recognition of DUET’s mission to support local governments everywhere by enabling them to better visualise, simulate and predict the impact of both complex daily operational decisions and longer-term policies through integration of urban data into virtual replicas of cities.

“This is a fantastic achievement for the DUET team which recognises the big ambition of our partner cities, Athens, Pilsen and the region of Flanders, to transform and improve services” said Lieven Raes, manager at Digitaal Vlaanderen and coordinator of the DUET project. “By focusing on specific use cases, from healthy mobility to spatial planning and citizen engagement, we are able to create multi-disciplinary risk-free digital experimentation environments, which make it easy for local administrations to effectively model and explore policies before rolling them out on the ground.”

DUET’s innovative Digital Twins consume open data and data models from different sources within a city and integrate them with new technology capabilities including artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to provide a replica city environment where policy experimentation can safely take place.

“I couldn’t think of a more appropriate award,” said Susie Ruston McAleer of 21c, a founding partner of DUET present at the awards ceremony. ‘Over the next five years the use of digital twins will revolutionise how cities aggregate data adhering to legal and ethical principles, and intuitively make it understandable. This enabling technology will unlock the real potential in open data for driving future decisions for cities whilst simultaneously enhancing the current city experience for all.”

The annual World Smart City Awards is a prestigious international competition that seeks to recognize pioneering projects, ideas and strategies making cities around the world more livable, sustainable, and economically viable.  The awards go to the most innovative and successful projects being implemented and developed in the fields of data and technology.