Digital Twin + AI: How Highland Park Envisions Digital Twin for Near - Matching Building Facades using AI for Everyday Use

Overview

Traditional urban planning often relies on static 2D maps, creating a technical gap that makes it difficult for non-planning staff to participate effectively in sophisticated 3D analysis. To address this challenge, Highland Park is enhancing its Digital Twin initiative by fusing detailed street-level imagery with advanced AI technologies. This approach not only provides robust, intuitive platforms for complex simulations but also empowers everyday users to engage meaningfully in urban development.

As cities worldwide face evolving urban planning challenges - from managing infrastructure upgrades to ensuring sustainable growth - visionary leaders are leveraging cutting-edge technology that transcends traditional maps: the Digital Twin. By integrating AI with street-level imagery, Highland Park aims to enrich its digital model with near-authentic building facades and contextual details, transforming how both planning and non-planning staff visualise and interact with urban environments.

The core goal is to bridge the technical gap with a flexible, intuitive platform that is powerful enough for sophisticated 3D analysis yet accessible for day-to-day city use.

Seeing the Future in 3D

A Digital Twin is a virtual, dynamic representation of the real world that encompasses physical objects, systems, relationships, and behaviours. For Highland Park, this means creating a highly accurate, living 3D replica of the entire city, capturing everything from ground level to the tops of its buildings and trees. By incorporating Street imagery, the city can achieve an unprecedented level of detail in building facades, ensuring that each virtual structure closely resembles its real-world counterpart.

Building a city-scale digital twin requires robust technology capable of handling massive amounts of geographic data. The foundation of Highland Park's Digital Twin utilises the powerful Esri ecosystem, centred on ArcGIS Pro, the 3D Basemap Solution, and CityEngine.

By leveraging this technology alongside street-level visuals, Highland Park is poised to dramatically elevate its urban planning capabilities, enabling not only a deeper understanding of the built environment but also facilitating community engagement and informed decision-making.

The Digital Blueprint: Forging Highland Park’s Living Pulse

The transformation of Highland Park's spatial DNA into a functional, city-scale digital twin was achieved through a meticulously designed eight-stage technical workflow that bridges complex engineering with public engagement.

1. Forging the Virtual Skeleton: The journey began with raw aerial LiDAR data—billions of laser pulses, compressed LAZ files are now active LAS datasets to establish a high-resolution point cloud foundation.
2. Defining the Urban Hierarchy: Using the ArcGIS Pro 3D Basemap solution, the system was "taught" to recognise itself, automatically reclassifying billions of points into distinct layers for buildings, ground, bridges, and trees.
3. The Geometric Awakening: The point cloud evolved into a tangible environment as multi-patch buildings and critical infrastructure—including bridges and highway segments—were extracted from it and rendered as realistic polygons.
4. Targeted High-Fidelity Precision: In collaboration with city staff, high-priority locations were identified for enhanced Level of Detail (LOD), transitioning the model from generic urban massing to recognisable landmark features.
5. Infusing AI-Driven Realism: To mirror the physical world, Street imagery and custom field data were processed via the AI Ready web application, generating cleaned, high-resolution texture tiles for every building facade.
6. Architectural Logic and Immersion: By applying CityEngine Procedural Rules and the Facade Manager tool, these AI-generated textures were mapped onto the geometry, creating a realistic digital environment that feels authentic to residents and staff.
7. Modelling the City’s Arteries: Every freeway junction, segment, and signboard was reconstructed with surgical precision. Using Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) and specialised street-procedural rules, the city’s transportation lifelines were integrated into the 3D scene.
8. Power in the Hands of the Public: The final transition moved the data from the laboratory to the street. Published via ArcGIS Online, the production-ready web application now serves as a single, interactive portal, democratizing access for every department and citizen.

Flowchart

Transforming Data into Action

Following the foundational work with ArcGIS Pro and the 3D Basemap Solution, the next step is to transform raw spatial points into detailed, realistic assets.

1. Creating Realistic Buildings: Using specialised tools, the system automatically analyses elevation data to grasp complex roof forms. The final outputs, referred to as 3D Textured Buildings, are stored as Multipatch features. For added visual realism, the workflow incorporates external resources, such as Google Maps Street Imagery, and may employ procedural modelling in CityEngine to refine facade reconstruction and enhance texture detail.

2. Populating the Environment: Beyond buildings, the Digital Twin also includes intricate elements derived from LiDAR data, such as trees - rendered in both realistic and schematic styles - and essential layers for bridges and other infrastructure. This construction process, detailed in the Digital Twin Workflow, concludes with post-processing, quality assurance, quality control (QA/QC), and proper attribution, ultimately leading to final export, delivery, and 3D basemap integration. This construction process - outlined in the Digital Twin Workflow - concludes with Post-processing, QA/QC, and Attribution, which ultimately leads to the final Export, Delivery, and 3D Basemap Integration.
   
   

The Digital Advantage: How the Twin Helps the City

The true strength of Highland Park's Digital Twin is in its ability to empower city staff, leadership, and residents, fostering confidence in decision-making and collaboration. By integrating detailed 3D assets with continuous data flows, the city can effectively support complex decision-making and long-term resilience planning.

This technology meets critical city needs through:

1. Enhanced Urban Planning and Development: The Digital Twin offers an advanced platform for visualising the impacts of development. Planners can use the interactive 3D model to explore new urban areas and quickly assess the effects of alternative designs. For example, the city built its Digital Twin using LiDAR data and utilised it to analyse proposed development projects against sustainability goals, ensuring that new construction does not harm local biodiversity.

2. Resilience and Emergency Management: A significant advantage of a location-intelligent Digital Twin is its ability to forecast and mitigate risks. The detailed 3D terrain and infrastructure layers form the basis for complex simulation and modelling. In flood-prone areas, the Twin can model heavy rainfall and perform hotspot analyses to identify potential flood zones. This predictive capability enables city leadership to prepare for natural disasters by visualising which infrastructure may be affected in various scenarios.

3. Operational Efficiency and Data Access: The Digital Twin serves as a centralised repository for municipal data, fostering cross-departmental collaboration. Managing city assets becomes easier by enabling visualisation of everything - from freeways and traffic signals to trees and underground infrastructure - in a single, spatially accurate 3D view. This data is delivered via a web portal, such as ViewPro-Urban360, which provides essential analysis tools, including Parcel Summary, Draw, Measure, and Print. Such broad access allows all city staff, including frontline employees, to benefit from complex modelling and analysis.

This is what we learned:

● Define Purpose Early: It is critical to determine your goals and the specific assets to be modelled at the start to ensure the twin solves the right problems.

● Prioritise Maintenance: A digital twin is only reliable if it stays up to date; without regular updates, it leads to costly mistakes.

● Use Existing Resources: Start by exploring Esri’s Living Atlas for publicly available layers, such as 3D buildings and trees, to form the basis of your twin.

This is what not to do:

● Don't Ignore Alignment: Never process building footprints without ensuring they share the exact same coordinate system as your LiDAR data, or your buildings will not align correctly.

● Don't Silo Data: Avoid restricting these powerful models to technical staff; the greatest benefits come when data is available to frontline employees in the field.

You May Find Useful

To help you get started on your own implementation, here are several ready-to-use resources and tools:

● ArcGIS Pro 3D Basemap Solution: A set of specialised, automated workflows to streamline the creation of 3D visualisations link.

● Convert LAS Tool: An essential utility for translating compressed LAZ LiDAR data into usable LAS files for 3D modelling link.

● Step-by-Step Blueprint: Check out this Figma Blueprint for building the Digital Twin link.

● ArcGIS Urban: An immersive 3D environment specifically for urban planners to model scenarios and conduct shadow or view corridor studies.

● ArcGIS Experience Builder: Use this to create simple, user-friendly editors that allow non-planning staff to enter data without learning complex GIS software.

● Open Data Portals: Check your local city or regional portals for authoritative 3D building and elevation datasets.