The book uniquely explores the fundamentals of blockchain and digital twin technologies and their uses in smart cities. In the previous decade, many governments explored artificial intelligence, digital twin, and blockchain, and their roles in smart cities. This book discusses the convergence of two transformative technologies, digital twin and blockchain, to address urban challenges and propel the development of smarter, more sustainable cities. This convergence empowers cities to create real-time replicas of urban environments (digital twins) and secure, transparent data management (blockchain) to improve city planning, management, and civic services. In this application, the concept of a digital twin involves creating a virtual, data-driven replica of a city or specific urban systems, such as transportation, energy, or infrastructure. This digital twin mirrors the real world, gathering data from various sensors, IoT devices, and other sources to provide a holistic view of the city’s operations. Furthermore, blockchain technology offers a decentralized and tamper-resistant ledger for securely storing and managing data. In the context of smart cities, blockchain can ensure data integrity, privacy, and transparency, enabling trust and collaboration among various stakeholders. This book covers many important topics, including real-time city modeling; data security and the trustworthy storage of sensitive urban data; transparent governance to facilitate accountable governance and decision-making processes in smart cities; improved city services; disaster resilience (by providing insights into vulnerabilities and efficient resource allocation during crises); sustainable urban planning that optimizes resource allocation, reduces energy consumption, and minimizes environmental impact, which fosters sustainable development; citizen engagement; and much more. This book will not only provide information about more efficient, resilient, and sustainable urban environments, but it also empowers citizens to be active participants in shaping the future of their cities. By converging these technologies, cities can overcome existing challenges, encourage innovation, and create more livable, connected, and responsive urban spaces. Audience This book has a wide audience in computer science, artificial intelligence, and information technology as well as engineers in a variety of industrial manufacturing industries. It will also appeal to economists and government/city policymakers working on smart cities, the circular economy, clean tech investors, urban decision-makers, and environmental professionals.

Recently, a new digital twin consortium has been established that aims to deploy digital twin technology in new markets as well as in the development of smart cities. Designing smart cities, smart communities, and smart ecosystems powered by optimal digital twin deployments is a vision that currently only futurists can entertain and requires some time to reach large-scale adoption. However, it is incumbent upon us as a society to educate and train future generations on how to leverage digital twin technologies in order to optimize our daily lives as well as increase our efficiency, productivity, and safety. Impact of Digital Twins in Smart Cities Development provides insights regarding the global landscape for current digital twin research and deployments and highlights some of the challenges and opportunities faced during large-scale adoptions. Critical domains such as ethics, data governance, cybersecurity, inclusion, diversity, and sustainability are also addressed and considered. Covering topics such as digital identity and digital economics, this reference work is ideal for urban planners, engineers, policymakers, industry leaders, scientists, economists, academicians, practitioners, researchers, instructors, and students.

The book uniquely explores the fundamentals of blockchain and digital twin technologies and their uses in smart cities. In the previous decade, many governments explored artificial intelligence, digital twin, and blockchain, and their roles in smart cities. This book discusses the convergence of two transformative technologies, digital twin and blockchain, to address urban challenges and propel the development of smarter, more sustainable cities. This convergence empowers cities to create real-time replicas of urban environments (digital twins) and secure, transparent data management (blockchain) to improve city planning, management, and civic services. In this application, the concept of a digital twin involves creating a virtual, data-driven replica of a city or specific urban systems, such as transportation, energy, or infrastructure. This digital twin mirrors the real world, gathering data from various sensors, IoT devices, and other sources to provide a holistic view of the city’s operations. Furthermore, blockchain technology offers a decentralized and tamper-resistant ledger for securely storing and managing data. In the context of smart cities, blockchain can ensure data integrity, privacy, and transparency, enabling trust and collaboration among various stakeholders. This book covers many important topics, including real-time city modeling; data security and the trustworthy storage of sensitive urban data; transparent governance to facilitate accountable governance and decision-making processes in smart cities; improved city services; disaster resilience (by providing insights into vulnerabilities and efficient resource allocation during crises); sustainable urban planning that optimizes resource allocation, reduces energy consumption, and minimizes environmental impact, which fosters sustainable development; citizen engagement; and much more. This book will not only provide information about more efficient, resilient, and sustainable urban environments, but it also empowers citizens to be active participants in shaping the future of their cities. By converging these technologies, cities can overcome existing challenges, encourage innovation, and create more livable, connected, and responsive urban spaces. Audience This book has a wide audience in computer science, artificial intelligence, and information technology as well as engineers in a variety of industrial manufacturing industries. It will also appeal to economists and government/city policymakers working on smart cities, the circular economy, clean tech investors, urban decision-makers, and environmental professionals.

The global smart cities market size was valued at USD 1,226.9 billion in 2022 and is expected to register a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.8% from 2023 to 2030. Firstly and visually, a smart city is a city that has no traffic jams. In the smart cities, both information and communication technologies are integrated for exchanging real-time data between their citizens, governments, and organisations. Blockchain has been considered as the key driver for development of smart cities. Blockchain technology can provide high security for large communications and transactions between many stakeholders in the smart cities. In addition, digital twins are also considered as the starting key for construction of smart cities. Digital twin refers to a simulation of physical products in virtual space. This simulation makes full use of physical models/wireless sensor networks/ historical data of city operation to integrate big information (digital twin cities) under multi-discipline, multi-physical quantities, multi-scale, and multi-probability. Digital Twin, Blockchain, and Sensor Networks in the Healthy and Mobile City explores how digital twins and blockchain can be used in smart cities. Section 1 deals with their promising applications for safe and healthy cities, respectively. Section 2 covers other promising applications and current perspectives of blockchain and digital twin for future smart cities. Together with its companion volume, Digital Twin, Blockchain, and Sensor Networks in the City, this book will help us make sense of the vast amount of data around the city, and will guide us to use that data to create happy, healthy, safe and productive lives.

This book reviews research works in recent trends in blockchain, AI, and Digital Twin based IoT data analytics approaches for providing the privacy and security solutions for Fog-enabled IoT networks. Due to the large number of deployments of IoT devices, an IoT is the main source of data and a very high volume of sensing data is generated by IoT systems such as smart cities and smart grid applications. To provide a fast and efficient data analytics solution for Fog-enabled IoT systems is a fundamental research issue. For the deployment of the Fog-enabled-IoT system in different applications such as healthcare systems, smart cities and smart grid systems, security, and privacy of big IoT data and IoT networks are key issues. The current centralized IoT architecture is heavily restricted with various challenges such as single points of failure, data privacy, security, robustness, etc. This book emphasizes and facilitates a greater understanding of various security and privacy approaches using the advances in Digital Twin and Blockchain for data analysis using machine/deep learning, federated learning, edge computing and the countermeasures to overcome these vulnerabilities.

This book provides a holistic perspective on Digital Twin (DT) technologies, and presents cutting-edge research in the field. It assesses the opportunities that DT can offer for smart cities, and covers the requirements for ensuring secure, safe and sustainable smart cities. Further, the book demonstrates that DT and its benefits with regard to: data visualisation, real-time data analytics, and learning leading to improved confidence in decision making; reasoning, monitoring and warning to support accurate diagnostics and prognostics; acting using edge control and what-if analysis; and connection with back-end business applications hold significant potential for applications in smart cities, by employing a wide range of sensory and data-acquisition systems in various parts of the urban infrastructure. The contributing authors reveal how and why DT technologies that are used for monitoring, visualising, diagnosing and predicting in real-time are vital to cities’ sustainability and efficiency. The concepts outlined in the book represents a city together with all of its infrastructure elements, which communicate with each other in a complex manner. Moreover, securing Internet of Things (IoT) which is one of the key enablers of DT’s is discussed in details and from various perspectives. The book offers an outstanding reference guide for practitioners and researchers in manufacturing, operations research and communications, who are considering digitising some of their assets and related services. It is also a valuable asset for graduate students and academics who are looking to identify research gaps and develop their own proposals for further research.