CDBB West Cambridge Digital Twin: Lessons Learned

TL;DR

This paper details the development of a real-time, privacy-aware digital twin architecture for West Cambridge, emphasizing low-latency data streaming, JSON data modeling, and system responsiveness to individual sensor events.

Contribution

It introduces a novel real-time sensor data architecture using push technology and JSON structures, enabling rapid response and flexible data management in digital twins.

Findings

Achieved minimal latency from sensor event to visualization

Implemented JSON-based data structures for complex relations

Demonstrated system responsiveness at the timescale of individual sensor messages

Abstract

The report describes the digital architecture developed for the West Cambridge Digital Twin, particularly focussed on real-time sensor data collection and analysis with a privacy framework allowing occupants of the buildings to be first-class participants in the system. The implementation has some notable characteristics. In particular 'push' technology is used throughout such that information streams from the incoming asynchronous individual sensor events through to the end-user web pages with the absolute minimum latency, including real-time generated simple and complex events derived from the the underlying sensor data and the updating of visualisations such as an in-building heatmap. We believe the ability of the entire system to respond in the timescale of individual sensor messages to be unique. JSON structures are used to represent all data types including sensor readings, sensor types, building objects, organisations and people, with the idea that JSON-LD may represent a more suitable way than XML/RDF for managing relations between those objects (such as the 'occupies' relationship of people to offices, or the 'type' relationship of sensors to sensor types).