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Burgas Green City Digital Twin
As part of the METACITIES Excellence Hub project, the Bulgarian Cluster has developed a pilot demonstration of the Burgas Green city Digital Twin bringing together innovative digital technologies to support smarter and more sustainable city monitoring and management in the EE and resource management domain.
The Digital Twin in the Green City domain is aimed at developing an advanced digital platform capable of modelling, analysing, and forecasting complex urban scenarios related to energy efficiency and resource management. The system is designed to support data-informed decision-making processes that contribute to the development of sustainable, resilient, and citizen-oriented urban environments.
To achieve this, it combines geospatial information from multiple sources, energy consumption and efficiency data, as well as sensor-generated environmental datasets into an interactive 3D virtual representation of the city. Through the integration of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and simulation functionalities, the Digital Twin enables urban planners, municipal authorities, energy experts, and citizens to better understand current urban conditions, test alternative development scenarios, and evaluate their potential impacts. In this way, the platform facilitates more effective investment planning, optimised resource allocation, increased citizen engagement, and the transition toward more sustainable urban development.
In support of these objectives, a comprehensive user story and requirements analysis process was carried out to identify both functional and non-functional stakeholder needs within the pilot city of Burgas. This process guided the conceptualisation and implementation of the Green City Digital Twin as an integral component of the Smart Burgas ecosystem.
Throughout the development of the new features of the Burgas Smart city platform, the METACITIES project team worked closely with stakeholders implementing the Quadruple Helix approach – including public authorities, industry, academia, and civil society – to co-design priorities, identify real-world challenges, and develop proof-of-concept scenarios addressing actual needs of the city.
Designed with scalability at its core, the platform can gradually expand from pilot to large-scale implementation, including real-data from different types of energy users – public buildings, private buildings, etc.
See the Burgas Buildings Energy Performance Analysis tool, as a part of the Burgas Green city Digital Twin, watching the pilot demonstration video, showcasing the platform’s capabilities and its potential to support future city needs and actual urban challenges, strategic priorities, and sustainability ambitions.
The Buildings Energy Performance Analysis tool is demonstrated through a complete end-to-end workflow showing how the platform integrated energy performance assessment, and visualisation of monitoring and predictive scenarios results.
The SmartBurgas platform, in its EE module, may subsequently generate projected performance results that estimate the impact of the selected measures. Through map-based views and immersive visualisation environments, users can understand both the analytical findings and their spatial implications in a clear and intuitive manner.
The primary value of the project lies in the continuity of the overall workflow rather than in the isolated operation of individual system components. The implementation methodology is described as a sequence of operational steps:
- Identification of a building performance issue;
- Review of supporting spatial and contextual information;
- Definition of a feasible intervention scenario;
- Execution of simulations and performance projections;
- Assessment of projected outcomes for planning and decision support.
This approach makes the workflow suitable both as a technical demonstration and as a practical decision-support process that can be communicated effectively to non-technical stakeholders. The emphasis is placed on user actions.