Digital Twins for Geospatial Decision-making

Abstract

Integrating digital twin (DT) technologies with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) marks a transformative shift in geospatial analysis, enabling continuous synchronization for an accurate representation of the physical landscape, offering decision-makers dynamic and context-specific insights for informed decision-making. Geospatial data, crucial across various domains, has historically faced challenges in integration, visualization, and interpretation due to its vast and fragmented nature. The emergence of the DT concept has the potential to address these constraints by creating virtual replicas of real-world objects in a digital environment. The seamless integration of DT technologies with existing GIS (integrated DT-GIS) enables multiple stakeholders to make collaborative decisions through interactive processes. This review aims to investigate the state of the art of the use of integrated DT-GIS across domains such as urban planning, disaster management, and water resource and environmental management, challenges that hinder the full potential of integrated DT-GIS, and some improvements that can be made to enhance the capabilities of integrated DT-GIS for geospatial analysis to enhance the decision-making process.