Digital Twins for Climate-Neutral and Resilient Cities. State of the Art and Future Development as Tools to Support Urban Decision-Making

The increased effects of climate change in the built environment require a rapid and effective response to adapt urban settlements to the main impacts related to heatwave, extreme precipitation, sea-level rise, and so on. At the same time, there is not much time to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to climate change and limit the mean temperature of the planet within the 1.5 °C imposed by the Paris Agreement. In this perspective, cities around the world have a key role toward carbon neutral and resilient targets. In parallel in the last years, we are witnessing the impacts of a big amount of data and information available at the city scale. There are many data coming from different databases that can be processed and managed to support the urban climate action planned and designed by decision-makers and urban practitioners, for example, to assess the carbon emission of the building sector or to simulate the effects of extreme precipitation or urban heat island and consequence behavior of the built environment. In this scenario, in the last years, among many different digital enable technologies available in the Industry 4.0 ambit, it has gained more attention in the field of urban planning and urban design the digital twin concept that could synthesize in a digital representation of the real-world data and information flow that could exchange from the physical side to digital representation and vice versa. The aim of the paper is to analyze the urban digital twin developed in last years in Europe to evaluate if and how they consider the climate change issue, in order to understand the state of the art, the applications developed for climate change and which is the level of experimentation in order to study and develop guidelines to build urban digital twin as a support tool for a climate-neutral and resilient city

Freight Service Design for the Italian Railways Company

In this paper, we present a mathematical model to design the service network, that is the set of origin-destination connections. The resulting model considers both full and empty freight car movements, and takes into account handling costs. More specifically, the model suggests the services to provide, as well as the number of trains and the number and type of cars traveling on each connection. Quality of service, which is measured as total travel time, is established by minimizing the waiting time of cars at intermediate stations. Our approach yields a multi-commodity network design problem with concave arc cost functions. To solve this problem, we implement a tabu search procedure which adopts ``perturbing\u27\u27 mechanisms to force the algorithm to explore a larger portion of the feasible region. Computational results on realistic instances show a significant improvement over current practice

Territorial Ecosystem for circular economies: Eco3R research project

Among the transitional processes that could lead to building consistent sustainable solutions, circular economies practices (CE) are complex processes which must take into account diff erent topics such as stakeholder engagement, material fl ows opportunities, end of life expectations and EU limit perspectives or targets. This paper introduces briefl y the concept of circular territorial ecosystems with respect to the Eco3r research project, carried on by the Politecnico of Turin (DAD) from 2020, in collaboration with CCS, the in-house providing company of 19 municipalities in the area of Turin. Some crucial data on waste management and the main project’s targets are presented. Some Eco3r projects’ outputs are outlined in order to show this local experiment can become a model to scale or replicate in other communities in Europe. The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 describes the background problem with main data and critical issues regarding the case study; Section 2 is describing the target of the research project Eco3R and the scientifi c approach adopted; Section 3 is dedicated on the main output of Eco3R project and the discussion on the further research developments

From CFD to GIS: a methodology to implement urban microclimate georeferenced databases

The objective of this paper is to present a methodology for the integration between a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) microclimate simulation and a Geographic Information System (GIS). The first workflow involves the attribution of spatial coordinates to the point data extracted from the CFD, the implementation of a SQLite database, and the connection to the database for visualizing and using information on environmental and comfort variables. The second workflow involves the georeferencing of the CFD raster output, the attribution of an ID to the point data, the creation of a point grid in a GIS environment, and the merging of these with the point data on the microclimate. For demonstration purposes, the methodology is tested on a real case study using ENVI-met and ArcGIS Pro