The 21st of March 2023 marks the kickoff of the “TwinBy” qualification programme for 18 projects by Bavarian municipalities. Financed by the Bavarian State Ministry for Digital Affairs and coordinated by bayern.innovativ, the programme will support the first steps of Bavarian municipalities in developing their own Urban Digital Twins.

The qualification programme is based on building competencies in Bavarian local municipalities in the Smart District Data Infrastructure (SDDI) reference architecture approach, to help municipalities design the data-related, content-related and organisational foundations for the development of a geo-based digital twin. After getting to grips with the low-threshold SDDI approach, municipalities will be able to develop their own Urban Digital Twins so that analysis, scenario simulations and management decisions can be visualised, and complex urban and rural contexts can be better understood.

On the basis of their combined expertise in the field, Creative Climate Cities (CCC) working together with Virtual City Systems (VCS) and CADFEM, have crafted a “blended learning” qualification programme to be run through 2023 in the form of online webinars, a structured online E-Learning course, as well as in-person seminars and workshops to support the municipal pilot projects’ first steps in translating the SDDI concept into fully functioning urban digital twins for locally-defined use cases.