Covid-19 is driving an international smart cities market boom with 500 urban areas around the world expected to adopt digital twin technology by 2025, according to ABI Research.

The need to increase resilience and optimise resource management in light of Covid-19 will be among the key drivers for the growth of digital twins over the next five years, according to ABI.

The tech market advisory firm expects the number of urban digital twins to exceed 500 by 2025, and that implementation will expand beyond limited pilots to widespread multi-purpose deployments.

ABI’s latest smart cities and smart spaces quarterly report positions Cityzenith, Bentley Systems and Microsoft as businesses best placed to capitalise in this expanding market. It is estimated that the digital twin market will grow from $3.8bn in 2019 to $35.8bn per year by 2025, at a CAGR of 45.4%.

Dominique Bonte, vice president at ABI Research, said: “Real-time 3D models of cities-built environment allow scenario analysis through the simulation of the potential impact of natural disasters like flooding, adoption of generative design principles for new city developments that optimise energy savings and solar capacity, and saving costs by operating cities more efficiently and effectively.”

He noted that since the first digital twins were deployed in cities such as Singapore around three years ago, features had quickly expanded to enable a much wider range of application areas including infrastructure coverage planning and green infrastructure management.

Boston is one city to have already employed the use of digital twins, alongside Helsinki, Jaipur and Dublin.

“The digital twin ecosystem activity is growing quickly with more suppliers announcing more deployments in more cities,” said Bonte. “Vendors like Dassault Systèmes and others are paving the way for extending urban digital twins to marketplaces and opening access to key metrics and dashboards to the citizens themselves, increasing their overall involvement and helping gain approval of city government decisions and policies.”

To help cities achieve carbon neutrality, Cityzenith announced in October 2020 that it would donate its digital twin software to up to ten cities over the next year as part of its Clean Cities, Clean Future campaign. Additionally, Bentley Systems partnered with Microsoft to integrate Azure IoT digital twins and Azure Maps into its iTwins platform.

“We at Cityzenith welcome this news and are delighted to be a part of the growing digital twin industry,” said Michael Jansen, CEO of Chicago-based Cityzenith. “We believe our Clean Cities, Clean Future campaign can be a key component of this global effort towards cleaner cities and a safer environment.”