Innovative Sofia Joins the GATE Project to Implement Sofia’s Digital Twin and to Design and Test Sustainable Urban Solutions

7 June, 2020

Innovative Sofia becomes a partner in the implementation of Sofia’s Digital Twin – a large interdisciplinary pilot project of the Center for Excellence in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence GATE. The project aims at developing a digital twin platform for designing, testing, applying, and servicing the entire lifecycle of the urban environment in a 3D simulation of the city.

 

City Digital Twin – the first project of its kind for Bulgaria

This ambitious research project is simulating, for the first time in Bulgaria, the complex socioeconomic urban processes, and will test strategies and to maximize sustainability in cities. This will require a spatially-resolved simulation of a wide range of scenarios specific to Sofia (and to every big city in general) and related to urban climate, transport of goods and people, infrastructure development, buildings’ energy performance, air and noise pollution, etc. The simulation of the scenarios will be achieved by building a semantically enriched, holistic, multi-layered 3D model of Sofia with three-dimensional replicas of terrains, buildings, streets, vegetation, etc., as well as by meaningful integration of data sets for simulation analysis.

Innovative Sofia participates in the pilot project together with experts from Sofia Municipality, Sofia Investment Agency, and Sofproect with expertise in urban management, giving access to data sets about the city, engaging the public interest and public awareness.

 

 About GATE

The GATE project – “Big data for a smart society” – started in October 2019. GATE is the first center of excellence, where Bulgaria is a participant.

GATE is a joint initiative of Sofia University ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’, which acts as a coordinator, Chalmers University and Chalmers Industrial Technologies, Sweden. The goal is to create a big data and artificial intelligence excellence center with three modern labs that will process data sets in four areas – Future Cities, Intelligent Government, Smart Industry and Digital Healthcare.

The European Commission funds GATE under Horizon 2020 WIDESPREAD-01-2018-2019 Teaming Phase 2 program. As the only such center in Eastern Europe, GATE will be the liaison with the network of 55 Big Data Centers in Western Europe, and will play a strategic role in expanding that network and spreading best practices and innovative models, thus achieving a social impact at national, regional and European level.