55th Annual Shaw Lecture: Dr. John E. Taylor on Smart City Digital Twins and Urban Innovation

On March 3, 2025, Dr. John E. Taylor took the stage at Duke Energy Hall in Hunt Library for the 55th annual Shaw Lecture. As the inaugural Frederick Law Olmsted Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech, he shared insights on “Smart City Digital Twins: Towards More Sustainable, Resilient, and Livable Cities.”

Dr. Taylor emphasized the critical need for integrating human and engineered networks to address urbanization challenges and enhance city infrastructure. As urban areas face rapid growth, cities are implementing socio-technological changes to evolve into smarter cities. However, the success of this transformation depends on solutions that can amalgamate data from individual infrastructure components into comprehensive urban-scale networks.

While significant research has been conducted on data analytics at both the city scale and individual infrastructure components, Dr. Taylor pointed out a notable gap: a lack of understanding, data collection methodologies, and analytical tools to integrate and visualize disparate data and complex network dynamics effectively. 

To bridge this gap, Dr. Taylor introduced efforts to formalize and implement a Smart City Digital Twin platform. This platform aims to model and improve energy consumption and disaster mobility across various spatial scales within cities, thereby fostering more sustainable, resilient, and livable urban environments.

As the founder and Director of the Network Dynamics Lab, his research focuses on two primary areas:

• Sustained Energy Conservation: By coupling energy usage with occupant networks, Dr. Taylor examines inter-building network phenomena in urban settings to promote long-term energy efficiency.
• Disaster Response Improvement: He seeks to understand and enhance the response times of affected human networks during extreme events in urban areas, aiming to improve overall resilience.

One such improvement took place with the Chattahoochee river. Three years prior to their work, the river’s unruly and unpredictable nature resulted in 53 emergency rescue calls, with 11 calls ending in tragedy. With the help of digital twin mapping, they were able to identify unsafe conditions before they happened and retrieve people before there was a threat.   

“It sees problems before they even happen,” Dr. Taylor said. As a result of this cutting-edge technology, not a single life has been lost to the river’s flooding.

The Smart City Digital Twin platform represents a significant advancement in urban planning and management. By integrating diverse data sources and modeling complex network interactions, this platform offers a holistic approach to understanding and improving urban systems. Such innovations are essential as cities worldwide strive to become more sustainable, resilient, and livable in the face of ongoing urbanization and environmental challenges.

The development and implementation of Smart City Digital Twins stand to revolutionize how urban areas address energy consumption, disaster response, and overall livability, paving the way for a more sustainable urban future.