Ministry of Science and Technology Awards Major Grant for METROPOLIS Urban Digital Twin
The Architectural Artificial Intelligence Research Lab has been awarded a major grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology to advance METROPOLIS, an urban digital twin project developed with Tel Aviv.
Cities face urgent challenges, including sustainable growth, climate resilience, energy optimization, mobility management, and social inclusion. Addressing these issues requires adaptive, data-driven planning tools that can help city teams understand complex urban systems and evaluate alternatives before decisions are implemented.
Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) can integrate real-time urban data with advanced AI models to support more effective urban governance. In practice, however, their implementation remains limited. Urban data is often fragmented and heterogeneous, AI models require incompatible inputs, software ecosystems are difficult to connect, and cities often lack workflow orchestration and benchmarking tools. These barriers limit accessibility, scalability, and trust.
METROPOLIS seeks to overcome these challenges by developing an interoperable, AI-based UDT framework. The framework will include an AI data interoperability engine, a modular interface for deploying urban AI models, model orchestration for generating complex scenarios, comparative benchmarking of model performance, and intuitive decision-support interfaces.
The project will be validated through a pilot deployment in Tel Aviv, evaluating technical performance, usability for planning workflows, governance impact, and replicability for other cities. By making UDT technology more accessible, METROPOLIS aims to establish practical standards for AI integration and accelerate research in urban AI.
Learn more about the METROPOLIS project.