Digital Twin and IoT Integration for Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Management in Smart Cities

Abstract

The speed of urbanization and the increasing complexity of city infrastructure have placed a pressing need for City management systems that are intelligent, data-driven, can be used in real-time, and can predict failures or help to achieve sustainability. This paper proposes a complete approach that combines the Digital Twin (DT) technology with Internet of Things (IoT) sensor network for sustainable management of urban infrastructure in smart cities. The proposed architecture named DT-IoT-SUIM (Digital Twin–IoT Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Management) consists of five layers of hierarchical architecture including physical sensing, edge computing, semantic data fusion, twin synchronization and decision intelligence. The bidirectional data flow between physical assets, such as transportation systems, energy systems, water networks and public buildings, and their virtual representations enables real-time detection of anomalies, as well as scheduling of preventive maintenance and optimization of energy use based on multiple objectives. A threefold impact of 34.7% reduction in infrastructure down time, 28.3% reduction in energy usage and 41.2% increase in the efficiency of maintaining these infrastructures is found through experimental validation across three metro-pilot deployments—Delhi NCR, Mumbai Metropolitan Region and Bengaluru Urban Agglomeration—and compared to conventional management approaches. A security analysis that involves the analysis of distributed denial-of-service and adversarial data injection attacks confirms the framework's ability to support data security and resilience with an accuracy rate of 99.3% in the detection of threats. The outcomes prove DT-IoT-SUIM to be an interoperable, scalable and secure solution to smart city infrastructure of the future.