CREST: Climate-resilient coastal urban infrastructures through digital twinning

CREST aims to help vulnerable urban areas to set up and roll out collaborative platforms through digital twinning. It will be based on a breakthrough Augmented reality – AR technology and co-creation approaches to support environmental decision making and innovative policy practices, enabling robust and resilient responses to CC. ​

The key innovative features CREST will bring into one single framework will be a ground-breaking platform to create and operate graphical DTs in the urban areas enabling more grounded and faster CC adaptation and resilience; and co-creation and stakeholder engagement practices.

AugmentCity is a ground-breaking AR/VR digital twinning platform (currently in TRL7) to create and operate DTs of cities and regions, enabling data and “what-if” scenarios to be analysed, compared, and visualised in an interactive and immersive visualisation tool.

Comparing AugmentCity to the AR/VR tools on CC impacts, unlike the other technologies, AugmentCity has the capacity to provide a holistic view of cities´ sutstainability and preparedness. On the other hand, none of the other tools have a visual effect comparable to AugmentCity that generates 4D simulations and to our knowledge none of these are used as a support tool for participative decision-making.

CREST has 5 Set Objectives:

Develop and implement a monitoring and impact assessment framework for sustainability and climate resilience

Create Graphical Digital Twins (DTs), an innovative engagement and decision support for urban transformation

Promote capacity building and co-creation for greater resilience of urban infrastructure

Develop pathways for the future uptake and replication of CREST results

Broad citizen and stakeholder engagement for greater resilience and adaptation to CC

To achieve these 5 objectives CREST has 5 “Key Work Packages”:

The sustainability and resilience monitoring framework of urban areas will identify and select relevant KPIs and collect respective data for performing sustainability and resilience monitoring and climate impact assessment in the targeted urban areas, as well as for feeding the Digital Twin visualizations/simulations in WP3.

Policy co-creation processes based on a participatory/citizen science approach will map state-of-the-art to create a deeper understanding of the local status quo and will engage local communities to determine the climate resilience challenges to be the use cases for the co-creation and digital twinning experiments in the 3 urban areas (pilot sites). Following a common methodology, these experiments will be organized in all pilot sites in the framework of 2 co-creation workshops(using a control group approach), as well as subsequent follow-up activities.

Digital Twins will develop, install, run and improve/upscale DTs for the 3 urban areas. This will enhance the user experience which in turn, will enable seamless collaboration and co‐creation between all actors using gamification and simulation.

Communication, dissemination, and sustainability will be responsible for maximizing CREST ́s visibility and the sustainability and replicability of its results locally and at a larger geographical scale (European and global), engaging, therefore, a broader public.

Project Management will secure the effective coordination and management of CREST, including liaising with the EC and national funding agencies, communication between partners, and administrative, financial, and contractual management. quality control and risk management, innovation and IPR management, data management, and data protection.