Work Package Leaders from the BUILD project came together for an alignment workshop to advance the development of the LDT CitiVERSE EDIC service portfolio, designed to support cities and regions throughout their Local Digital Twin journey.
The workshop brought together teams working across BUILD Work Packages 2, 3 and 4 to align the services, tools and operational mechanisms that will help translate the LDT CitiVERSE EDIC vision into practical support for European local and regional authorities.
At the centre of the discussions was a simple question: how can cities move from an initial interest in Local Digital Twins to implementation, validation and, ultimately, scale?
Supporting cities throughout the Local Digital Twin journey
The emerging EDIC service portfolio is being structured around the different stages a public authority may encounter when developing a Local Digital Twin.
The proposed journey starts by helping cities identify where Local Digital Twins could create value and which use cases are most relevant to their priorities. From there, assessment and planning services are being developed to help public authorities understand their current readiness, identify gaps and translate their ambitions into an evidence-based roadmap.
Implementation support is another central part of the portfolio. The EDIC Sandbox is being designed to provide an environment where cities can discover and test Local Digital Twin tools and use cases before deployment, while dedicated learning resources will help public-sector teams build practical knowledge around areas such as data, interoperability, governance, architecture and procurement.
The portfolio also foresees validation services for both public authorities and solution developers. These services aim to assess Local Digital Twin use cases and solutions against areas including interoperability, trustworthiness, data openness and scalability, providing recommendations to support improvement and future deployment.
From individual tools to a structured European service offering
A key objective of the workshop was to ensure that these different elements do not operate in isolation, but form part of a coherent journey for cities.
The initial portfolio brings together opportunity identification, readiness assessment and roadmap generation, the EDIC Sandbox, implementation guidance and training, and validation mechanisms. Together, these services are intended to help cities progress from identifying a need to assessing, implementing, evaluating and eventually improving and scaling their Local Digital Twin initiatives.
The workshop also helped clarify the initial scope of the EDIC Sandbox. Its first service offering will focus on demonstrating use cases and recipes with pre-validated tools and demo data. More tailored proof-of-concept activities involving city-specific data, external environments or additional integrations fall outside this initial scope and may require additional support mechanisms.
Moving from vision to delivery
This work represents an important step in the operational development of LDT CitiVERSE EDIC: turning European collaboration around Local Digital Twins into concrete services that cities and regions can understand, access and use.
The BUILD partners will continue developing and validating the different components of the portfolio over the coming months, with further technical workshops and engagement opportunities planned as the services progress.
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