Leading smart city, Rotterdam

With around 650.000 inhabitants Rotterdam is the second largest city in the Netherlands. It is famous for its varied architectural landscape including skyscrapers. With home to Europe’s largest port and extensive distribution system including rail, roads, and waterways it is also known as “Gateway to Europe”.

Creating a sustainable urban environment in this city is challenging. Entrepreneurship and embracing innovative technology are recognized as one of the key success factors. Rotterdam therefore aims to become the world’s leading smart city, focusing on digitalisation, gaining data, and using it to optimise processes. Located in the middle of the river delta, Rotterdam is well aware of the necessity to focus on climate adaptation. Now, Rotterdam is globally a front runner in the resilient city program and home to the Global Centre of Excellence on climate adaptation.

One of the steps to make Rotterdam a smart and resilient city was the development of a Digital Twin of the city. One of the focus points of this Digital Twin was to develop a decision-support tool for urban planning. To be used by policy makers to monitor measures and quantify the effects on climate resilience.

Within this context 3Di was used to create highly detailed integrated hydrodynamic city models. Models that contain the domains of both surface flow and the sewerage system. The scenario results were used in large climate resilient projects. Delivering insights to define the baseline and set a realistic ambition. In the future the models can be used in a wide variety of applications, pluvial and fluvial flood, water system analysis and urban planning.

In recent years a number of projects contributed to the integration of the hydrodynamic city models with the 3D digital twin. In addition to technology, the development focused on data management, interfacing (via open standards) and visualization (communication). Rotterdam is one of the first cities in the world with an integrated 3D Digital Twin including hydrodynamic city models. The lessons learned from the project were shared with all Dutch municipals lowering the threshold to start with their 3D Digital Twins and take a big step in becoming a Smart City.