Enhanced Urban Planning Capabilities with Geographic Information Systems and Digital Twin Technologies
Corresponding technical white papers:
Blog series on Digital Twin technologies:
- Part One: Deploy Virtualized NVIDIA Omniverse Environment with Dell PowerEdge R760xa and NVIDIA L40 GPUs
- Part Two: Developing Digital Twin 3D Models on Dell PowerEdge R760xa with NVIDIA Omniverse virtualized platform
- Part Three: Synthetic Data Generation with Dell PowerEdge R760xa and NVIDIA Omniverse Platform
Introduction
Digital Twins are physically accurate virtual replicas of assets, processes, or environments, which reflect these entities throughout their life cycle. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer systems that connect geographic centric data with other sources of information, unlocking relationships and providing insights. GIS are being used across many industries, enabling users to perform geographic-centric analysis with 2D and 3D visualizations that are based on cartographic maps.
Both GIS and Digital Twin technologies are rapidly evolving, and they are increasingly overlapping into the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The ability to easily integrate these technologies offers a creative potential greater than the sum of their individual parts.
Digital Twin trajectory
The trajectory of Digital Twin technology over the coming years looks promising and transformative across various industries.
Gartner Technology Impact Radar 2024
Source: www.gartner.com
Here are some key trends and expected developments:
- Increased adoption and market growth: The Digital Twin market is projected to grow significantly. This growth is driven by the technology’s ability to reduce costs and enhance customer engagement.
- Enhanced integration and interoperability: Digital Twins will become more integrated into smart city and urban planning and other sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation.
- Advanced predictive capabilities: The use of Digital Twins for predictive maintenance and simulations will expand. For example, they will be used to simulate traffic flows and optimize city layouts.
- AI and machine learning integration: The integration of AI with Digital Twins will enhance overall capabilities, allowing for more accurate simulations and real-time data analysis. This will enable businesses to improve overall efficiency, by empowering spatial data science, anticipating supply chain disruptions, and optimizing logistics.
- Sustainability and climate change: Governments and organizations will use Digital Twins to simulate and plan for different climate change scenarios, helping to develop more sustainable practices and policies.
Digital Twins technology is becoming an increasingly integral component for driving innovation and efficiency across various sectors.
AI factory
AI factories will power the AI revolution, generating actionable intelligence, fresh content, and new insights in place of physical goods. The Dell AI Factory represents our strategy for embracing and implementing AI, ensuring successful and consistent deployment at any scale and location.
The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA is a collaboration between Dell and NVIDIA to offer an end-to-end AI enterprise solution that is designed to help organizations integrate and scale AI technologies efficiently. Here are some key aspects:
- Comprehensive integration: Combines Dell’s compute, storage, software, and services with NVIDIA’s advanced AI infrastructure and software suite. This integration supports a wide range of AI workloads, from workstations to data centers and cloud environments.
- Generative AI solutions: Includes solutions for generative AI, such as digital assistants, code generation, and natural language search. These solutions are pre-tested and validated, making it easier for businesses to deploy AI applications.
- Real-time collaboration: The platform supports real-time collaboration, allowing multiple users to work on AI models and 3D scenes simultaneously. This is particularly useful for sectors like urban planning, healthcare, and industrial design.
- Scalability and efficiency: Designed to scale AI deployments efficiently, providing a more affordable alternative to many public cloud solutions. The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA leverages high-speed networking and robust infrastructure to ensure seamless operations.
- Security and privacy: Provides enterprise-grade security features, ensuring that AI deployments are secure and compliant with data privacy regulations.
The Dell AI Factory is designed to help customers implement private AI factories and take advantage of the many benefits of AI as quickly as possible. Dell Technologies assists customers in identifying and prioritizing the AI use cases that drive the greatest business impact and simplifies the deployment and scaling of those AI use cases and applications with our validated solutions.
Dell AI Factory
Source: www.dell.com
Digital Twins is one key use case where the Dell AI Factory can be leveraged to facilitate development and deployment. For more information, see Industry Digital Twin Cities.
Enhancing Urban Planning outcome with Digital Twin technologies
Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc) is the creator of ArcGIS, a powerful GIS technology that provides tools to capture, view, edit, manage, analyze, and share data within the context of geo location. ArcGIS provides spatial intelligence capabilities offering unique insights empowering real-time understanding to transform decision making.
Esri ArcGIS CityEngine is an advanced 3D modeling solution that is specifically designed for creating and interacting on urban environments and scenarios, using either synthetic or real-world GIS data. It leverages ArcGIS technology and takes a procedural approach towards 3D modeling to optimize the time that is required to create large, interactive, and immersive urban environments.
NVIDIA Omniverse is a native OpenUSD platform for creating complex 3D virtual environments and developing AI applications for industrial digitalization. It enables developers to integrate Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) and RTX rendering technologies into existing software tools and simulation workflows.
OpenUSD, which was originally invented by Pixar Animation Studio, encompasses a collection of fundamental tools and capabilities that accelerate 3D workflows. USD provides for interchange of elemental assets (such as 3D models) or animations. USD also enables assembly and organization of any number of assets into virtual sets, scenes, shots, and worlds, transmitting them from application to application.
System architecture
High-level Architecture Overview
Source: www.infohub.delltechnologies.com
For virtualized deployment details, see Dell PowerEdge R760xa with Omniverse.
Key hardware specifications:
Component Details | |
CPU | 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6438M CPU @ 2.20 GHz (128 vCPU) |
Memory | 512 GB (16x 32 GB DDR-5 ECC) |
Storage | Local Raw 6,400 TB (8x 800 GB SSD SAS 12 Gbps) |
GPU | 4x L40 (FP32 TF 90; Memory 48 GB GDDR6 w/EEC; Media Engines 3 Video Encoder 3 Video Decoder 4 JPEG Decoder; Power 300 Watts) |
Installation and integration
Esri ArcGIS CityEngine application is hosted on a virtual workstation and integrated with Omniverse using Omniverse Connector for CityEngine.
- Install Esri ArcGIS CityEngine by downloading the software from the Esri website. Windows, Linux, and containerized support is available.
- Install Omniverse. For details, see Dell PowerEdge R760xa with Omniverse.
- Install Omniverse Connector for City Engine from Omniverse launcher.
The Omniverse Connector for CityEngine provides a unidirectional live sync with an Omniverse Nucleus instance. In addition to basic export functionality, repeated exports with the same name are accumulated using USD composition techniques, allowing for convenient tweaking of a previous model (for example, updating a single building within a large city) without the need to re-run full exports that are potentially time-consuming.
Building urban environments.
Esri ArcGIS CityEngine enables the creation of 3D city models using predefined templates, CityWizard, or custom user scripts for a procedural approach to modeling urban environments. Modeling cities through scripting is driven by a sequence of geometric, code-based commands within the Computer Generated Architecture (CGA) language. For users seeking a straightforward method to create an urban landscape, CityWizard offers the most user-friendly option.
Alternatively, a generation of real-world urban environments can be powered by Esri and OpenStreetMap. This enables 3D mock-ups of cities worldwide to be built in minutes including building footprints and terrain data.
Get Map Data, Zurich Switzerland
Dell Technologies, 200 Dell Way (RR5), Round Rock Texas. USA | Esri Redlands, 380 New York Street, CA. USA. | NVIDIA Corporation, 2788 San Tomas Express Way, Santa Clara, CA. USA. |
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.Get Map Data site locations: Dell Technologies, Esri, NVIDIA including building and terrain data
Esri ArcGIS CityEngine has been used in various cities around the world for urban planning, visualization, and simulation, including Zurich, Switzerland; Singapore; Philadelphia, USA; and Helsinki, Finland.
Esri ArcGIS CityEngine supports the import and export of USD assets with .usd, .usda, .usdc, and usdz file extensions, and it recognizes the USD mesh and cube node types. USD serves as the “glue” between GIS data with 3D Digital Twin assets, enabling integration and collaboration between different environments. By linking GIS data through NVIDIA’s Omniverse interoperability with USD, users can extend/enhance their visualization, simulation, and collaboration capabilities. These capabilities enable better and more efficient urban planning outcomes.
Enhanced simulation and visualization capabilities
Here, we showcase how the integration of Esri ArcGIS CityEngine software with the NVIDIA Omniverse platform offers enhanced simulation and visualization capabilities.
NVIDIA Omniverse provides advanced simulation capabilities through extensions. Simulations cover a wide range of functionalities, such as fluid dynamics and particle effects. For this example, we tried the Omniverse Sun Study simulation extension, which lets users model sunlight at different times and dates in a specific location.
The Sun Study simulation extension includes the following parameters:
- Dynamic skies: Set a dynamic sky for your scene in the Environment Browser panel.
- Location settings: You can accurately represent the sun’s position by setting the latitude and longitude of your wanted location in the Sun Study Location panel.
- Date and time: Set specific months, years, days, and times to see how the sunlight changes.
We tried this extension on a real-world urban environment. Using the Esri ArcGIS CityEngine Get Map Data function, we selected map data for Miami Beach, Florida, USA and imported it into Omniverse.
Refer to the following demonstration video highlighting the integration of Esri ArcGIS CityEngine and NVIDIA’s Omniverse and subsequent sun study simulation:
Esri CityEngine (Get Map Miami data) | NVIDIA Omniverse (Sun Study) |
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Extract from Demo Video
Sun Study Miami (frame a) | Sun Study Miami (frame b) |
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Frame extracts from a high-resolution simulation video
Conclusion
As GIS and Digital Twin technologies continue to evolve, they are increasingly overlapping with the field of AI. The ability to integrate and combine these capabilities offers the potential to transform industries, improve decision-making, and optimize processes.
Esri ArcGIS CityEngine is a 3D design solution for creating and interacting with urban environments using synthetic or real-world GIS data. The NVIDIA Omniverse platform is being used to solve some of the world’s most significant challenges from city-scale projects to planetary-scale initiatives.
As organizations seek to adopt Digital Twins and AI use cases, Dell Technologies can assist by simplifying deployments and scaling requirements with our AI factory offerings and validated solutions.
The papers and blogs in this series explore some practical implications and considerations of applying GIS and Digital Twin technologies to urban planning use cases. By using Dell PowerEdge R760xa accelerated servers as the foundational building blocks, we’ve demonstrated how these technologies can be effectively integrated, offering the potential for enhanced user outcomes.
To find out more how Dell Technologies can assist with Digital Twin and AI adoption see, A Digital Twin journey.
References
Enhancing Urban Planning with GIS & Digital Twin Technology
Virtual Workstation Interactive Collaboration with NVIDIA Omniverse