Vendors demo digital twins as a beautiful 3D city responding to a slider. Municipal engineers experience them as a reconciliation exercise between GIS layers that disagree by up to nine metres.
Authority, not accuracy
The hard question is not how precise a dataset is but which department owns the correct version. Until that is settled, the twin produces confident answers about a city that does not exist.
The projects that worked started narrow: one utility, one district, one question worth answering. The ones that stalled started with a citywide model and no owner.
Once the data layer is trustworthy, the simulations become genuinely useful — flood modelling and traffic signal retiming both paid for themselves in the cases we reviewed.
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