Call for papers BSGLg n° 85 (2025/2)
Urban Digital Twins: Challenges and Prospects
Editors : Roland Billen et Jean-Paul Kasprzyk
Urban digital twins are emerging as the future key elements in the management, development and planning of cities, in response to the numerous contemporary challenges our societies face. While geospatial technologies are already widely utilized at the urban level, ongoing advancements in data acquisition, processing, and structuring—thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT)—are enabling the creation of more integrated solutions, approaching digital twinning concepts used in industrial processes.
Our cities stand to benefit from versatile and multidimensional geospatial data infrastructures, fed by high-quality data (geometric, semantic, temporal), and coupled with advanced management and simulation tools. These twins could be used for crisis management, urban planning, environmental monitoring... in short, a multitude of applications that could benefit from the cross-referencing of spatial information.
However, urban digital twins must overcome technical, organisational, ethical and governance challenges, that are currently hindering their development and implementation. Many research questions remain, such as acquisition, quality, and interoperability of data, structuring of information, integration with simulation tools, and issues of governance and communication with various stakeholders (decision-makers, managers, citizens).
The aim of this special issue is to compile research addressing challenges and prospects of urban digital twins, encompassing their design, implementation, usage, and maintenance.
Calendar
30/05/2025 - Closing of receipt of contributions
30/12/2025 – Publication
Sending proposals
All proposals must be sent by email to rbillen@uliege.be
Instructions for authors
All article proposals must comply with the BSGLg instructions to authors. Article proposals must be submitted on the basis of the outline downloadable from the journal's website:
• canvas in Word format (.docx)
• canvas in Open Office format (.odt)
Full instructions for authors on formatting text, figures, tables and photos are available for download (pdf).
Proposals that do not follow the instructions for authors may be rejected.