23 Geospatial Digital Twins Offer Unmatched Clarity for Complex Systems Weary travelers lost in San Francisco International Airport (SFO) can access a map of the facility on their smartphones. The map, built with GIS technology, provides the information to get them where they need to go. But there’s much more to the map—it guides operations. These additional layers, accessible to the people who run and maintain the airport, reveal the airport’s dazzling complexity. All 1.8 million square feet of the international terminal are included. Every individual component—from the 15,000 doors to the 2,000 trees—is present and accounted for. Peel back those layers and peek underground. You’ll find the 400 miles of labeled subsurface utilities, including water, electrical, and wastewater. The airport’s exteriors are pictured, gathered through lidar and other methods, seamlessly integrated into the GIS. For operations detail, BIM find their place on the map. Closets, walkways, plumbing—it’s all there, ready to aid in repairs or long-term projects. Informative GIS layers, such as the location of wireless access points, augment the detailed BIM information. And this is just the static map information. Indoor tracking shows the position of critical equipment. Outside, the current locations of maintenance vehicles are revealed. From the public version to the sensitive high-security layers, it’s all the same GIS-supported map. But it’s more than that. This is SFO in its entirety: the permanent parts, the semipermanent, and those items always on the move. So let’s not call it a map. What SFO has built is a geospatial digital twin. Guiding Good Governance
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