Urban Twin Link
The Integration Layer for Urban Digital Strategies
Cities are facing major challenges: mobility transition, climate adaptation, and increasing land-use pressures. Digital city twins can help make complex interconnections visible – provided they can access a comprehensive and up-to-date data foundation.
But this is exactly where the problem lies: data is often distributed, difficult to find, or incompatible.
Urban Twin Link establishes the connection between digital twins and networked data spaces – enabling municipalities to leverage external data for planning and simulation. The software architecture was developed in 2025 and successfully tested with mobility and logistics data in the city of Augsburg. Based on this real-world pilot, the modular, containerized Open-Source stack (MIT license) has now been finalized and is available for reuse by other cities and data-space operators.
Urban Twin Link provides a robust, interoperable integration layer that helps cities enrich their digital twins with external data sources, provided basic visualization or analytics components are already in place.
Smart Loading Zones
In Augsburg’s city center, delivery traffic, retail businesses and pedestrians compete for limited space, while the demand for loading zones fluctuates significantly over the course of each day and week. Through the Urban Twin Link, the technical foundations for a fully data-driven analysis and optimization of the existing loading and delivery zones were established in the Augsburg use case.
The City of Augsburg’s Digital Twin was systematically enriched with external data sources from the Mobility Data Space (MDS) via the Urban Twin Link. Integrated datasets included floating car data from Mobito, logistics data from DHL, local sensor data from existing loading and delivery zones, and static contextual information such as cycling flows and accident hotspots. This combined data foundation enabled a more precise, citywide situational picture of delivery traffic and made hotspots, safety-critical conflicts and optimization potentials visible.
Automated analyses made it possible to identify spatial clusters of delivery stops, detect temporal peak patterns, and reveal operational bottlenecks. Cycling and accident data were also incorporated to highlight safety-critical areas and uncover inefficiencies or incorrect stopping behavior. Based on these datasets, analyses within the digital twin generated data-driven location recommendations for optimized or newly designated loading and delivery zones.
In addition, the insights gained enable the evaluation of dynamic loading zones that can flexibly adapt to actual demand and allow private and commercial users to share curb space more efficiently. In the long term, this approach serves as a scalable blueprint for other cities.
Modules & Architecture
Urban Twin Link is a modular, open-source software stack (MIT license) that connects municipal digital twins with established data spaces such as the Mobility Data Space (MDS).
Its architecture builds on proven open-source components such as the urban data platform CIVORA—an open-source solution for municipal data infrastructures developed by the Data Competence Center for Cities and Regions (DKSR). It uses open interfaces (e.g., NGSI-LD, OGC API, SensorThings API) to enable broad interoperability and data reusability.
All modules are containerized, individually deployable, and can be connected via REST API or message bus. This allows cities to use only the components they actually need.
Modul
Aufgabe
Data Ingestors
Capture static or not directly data-space-accessible sources (open data, geodata, statistics, sensor data).
Data Sink
Consumes datasets provided via the connector, harmonizes formats, performs quality and metadata checks, and stores datasets with timestamps.
ML/AI-Pipeline
Automates data preparation, transformation, modeling and forecasting for simulations and dashboards.
All modules (containers, APIs, configurations) are available as open source.
Benefits for Municipalities and Data Spaces
Urban Twin Link is designed as an open software stack, enabling any municipality in Germany to seamlessly and securely connect its digital twins with external data spaces.
Open & Sovereign
Thanks to its open-source approach and MIT license, there is no vendor lock-in. Municipalities retain full control.
Modular & Efficient
The modular architecture enables step-by-step integration into existing smart city infrastructures. Containerized components can be deployed and configured individually.
Standardized & Future-Proof
By using open interfaces, the solution is interoperable and easily integrable into existing IT landscapes.
Beyond Mobility
Urban Twin Link can be applied across a wide range of scenarios: its building blocks for data acquisition and integration (Ingestors, Data Sink) create a shared data foundation within any domain. While the ML/AI pipeline used in the proof of concept is currently tailored to mobility applications, it can be flexibly extended or adapted for energy, environment, buildings & infrastructure, and other IoT use cases. The examples below illustrate potential applications.
Smart Mobility & Logistik
Dynamic zones, traffic flow optimization
Energy & Climate
District-level load simulations and scenario modeling
Buildings & Infrastructure
Digital infrastructure and renovation planning
Resilience & Environment
Risk assessments, e.g., for flood events or heatwaves
Municipal IT & Data Strategies
Interoperable, scalable integrations
Get Involved
Status: Project completed (Autumn 2025).
Feel free to contact us if you have questions or if you are interested in deploying Urban Twin Link in your city.
Project Partners
