Recently, iResearch released the Industry Research Report on China’s Digital Twin Cities in 2023 (hereinafter referred to as the “Report”). Digital Twin City refers to the creation of a digital virtual city in the digital world that is consistent with physical city in appearance, action and thought, to realize monitoring, diagnosis, backtracking, prediction, and decision-making control of the real world, and to be used for the whole life cycle management of the physical city’s planning, construction, governance, and optimization, and to improve the city’s operational efficiency and urban residential experience.

The concept of digital twin city has been put forward for less than 10 years. During this period, although countries around the world have actively promoted the construction, it is still in the initial exploration stage of single scene and partial function realization. China put forward the concept of digital twin city as early as 2018 in the Outline of the Planning of Xiong'an New District in Hebei Province, and then clearly put forward the concept of improving the urban information model platform to explore the construction of digital twin cities, creating a good development environment for the digital twin cities, and guiding the provinces, regions and cities across  China to accelerate the implementation of construction. The market opportunities and challenges of digital twin cities coexist.

The report shows that the “giant technology” of digital twin cities, which combines many cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, BIM, GIS, artificial intelligence and so on, is assembled by means of building blocks. Its difficulties mainly focus on the three links of data management, information model and simulation analysis. The data access link is in urgent need of unified standards at the government level. The model level needs to break away from formalism and focus on semantic modeling. At the simulation level, it is necessary to establish a model base in multiple fields to improve the commercial landing ability of algorithm.

The report analyzes the development status of digital twin cities. From the perspective of market environment, the market environment as a whole has been positively developing under the combination of multi-pronged policy implementation and standard formulation. From the perspective of industrial structure, the industrial chain is in the early stage of integration and development, with significant characteristics of player giants and uncertain market structure. From the perspective of market size, the market size of China’s digital twin cities was 5.1 billion Chinese yuan in 2022, with a CAGR of 50%. The basic platform of urban information model and scenario-based application are implemented simultaneously.

The report believes that the digital twin city market urgently needs to promote the work process of standardization, business model innovation and citizen application development.