Between Research and Practice: VelocityAdapt Appears at the TUM Think Tank and at the “Digital Twins” Online EXPO
How do you plan for climate adaptation before construction begins?
In August, VelocityAdapt took part in a series of digital events: we were guests at the TUM Think Tank in Munich and in the Digital Twin Community. We presented our prototype and came away with lots of ideas.
How can municipalities simulate climate adaptation measures before they are implemented, and how can their implications for the administration and urban society be made visible? We are working on this in the VelocityAdapt project together with the cities of Bad Berleburg and Hagen. Questions like these cannot be answered from behind a desk alone. This made it all the more valuable that we were able to engage with practitioners and the expert community twice in August.
Expert presentation at the TUM Think Tank. We kicked things off with a virtual trip to Munich. At the TUM Think Tank’s Urban Digitainability Lab, which brings together research and practice on the green and digital transformation of cities. There, on August 13, Nino Bohn gave a presentation on the topic “Digital Twins for Municipal Climate Adaptation.” He provided insights into the research project and used selected features of our prototype to demonstrate what becomes possible when municipal data, urban digital twins, and language models come together. The discussion that followed provided us with valuable insights from a different perspective, and we’re delighted to have forged another connection between research and municipal practice through the Lab. Many thanks for the invitation and the open exchange!
Online EXPO “Digital Twins.” The event continued in late August. Around 100 representatives from municipalities, companies, and research institutions gathered for the online EXPO organized by Urban Digital and the DDGI. Eleven pitches and four thematic roundtables offered exciting insights into projects from other cities, current solutions from providers, and the challenges municipalities face when implementing digital twins. For us, the event was also a great opportunity to expand our network within the German digital twin community and to compare the insights from our real-world labs in Bad Berleburg and Hagen with the experiences of others. We took away two key observations:
- The digital twin is becoming a standard way of working. There was hardly any discussion of 3D models or technical details. The focus was on how municipalities can collaborate using shared data across departmental and disciplinary boundaries and better justify their decisions. However, as soon as data sources are consolidated, new challenges arise: Who owns the data, who maintains it, and who is responsible when data from different departments contradicts one another? We encounter these data governance issues time and again in our real-world labs, often before the technical ones.
- The users are urban planners. New data sources such as satellite imagery and mobile mapping are making digital twins increasingly rich. Many cities are thus faced with the same question: How can this complex geospatial data be made usable by people who are not computer scientists, but rather work in urban planning, environmental agencies, or park maintenance? This is exactly where VelocityAdapt comes in. With a no-code configurator and LLM support, experts in the public sector should be able to build their own “what-if” scenarios without having to program themselves.
- Convincing through concrete examples. At the technical level, the benefits of digital twins are often undisputed; in the political arena, however, tangible reasons are needed: climate adaptation, crisis management, or specific local issues. Our discussions with local governments also highlight how crucial the right framing of a project is for gaining support.
- Open standards are gaining traction. The solutions presented rely on modular entry points and open OGC formats. This is an important validation for our platform’s architecture, as municipalities should not be tied to a single vendor.
Both events have reinforced our approach and provided concrete ideas for the next development steps in the project.
What’s next? On September 23, our consortium will present at the Geography Connect Convention (GCC); this will be followed in December by Urban Digital’s next online EXPO on the topic of AI. We look forward to continued dialogue and will report as soon as the first results from the pilot tests in Hagen and Bad Berleburg are available.
VelocityAdapt combines urban digital twins, end-user development, and extended reality for municipal climate change adaptation. The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR).
