Urban management systems evolve from merely overseeing urban growth to comprehending interactions among cities’ natural, physical, cyber, and social systems. Urban digital twins leverage emerging technologies and serve as platforms to support city transitions. However, a generic urban digital twin framework with essential building blocks leading to a sustainable urban digital transformation is lacking, as most urban digital twin implementations focus on specific application areas and usages. In addition, as urban digital twins are rather new developments, it is important to clarify their concept, definition, and characteristics, including their joint components and functions. This paper presents findings from a domain analysis based on a systematic literature review on urban digital twins, including investigating the concept, definition, and characteristics of urban digital twins and identifying joint components and functions as building blocks for developing a conceptual framework of urban digital twins for sustainable digital transformation. In total, we identified six main components that could be subdivided into 16 components. Moreover, we identified four main functions that could be subdivided into ten functions. A conceptual framework for urban digital twins is proposed based on those components and functions. Two case studies were conducted to illustrate the framework’s applicability. It is an overarching goal that the proposed framework will become a useful reference and decision-making tool for urban planners, designers, constructors, and others.

In this paper, we report on the application of systems engineering in initiating the synthesis of a participatory planning support system (PSS) for sustainable regional planning. The systems engineering SPADE approach is applied in a model-based fashion to define and link sustainable development goals (SDGs) to regional and urban planning policies in a co-creative multi-stakeholder environment. The approach is demonstrated through a case study from the interregional climate, land-use, and transportation planning process (PAKT) in the Ålesund region in Norway. The work was performed using focus groups with planning stakeholders over a series of workshops to analyze, design, verify and validate the problem structure. Our study shows that the approach is useful for integrating and operationalizing the SDGs in a planning context. The methodology also brings clarity and structure to planning problems and provides a pedagogical frame to engage stakeholders in co-creative PSS synthesis. Further research is necessary to explore how structured elements may be exploited in PSS synthesis.

Balancing the positive and negative impacts of cruise tourism is a challenging task for port operators. Necessary information for cruise port planning and decision making may be laborious to acquire and further combine for holistic decision support. The current study applies a system-oriented sustainability scoring model to the port of Geiranger, Norway. The aim is to provide a practical and low-threshold approach for appraising sustainability aspects in cruise port planning and decision making. The scoring model provides an estimate of performance on sustainability indicators based on cruise call itinerary information and readily available ship data. Results demonstrate how using the scoring model can prove useful for both port management, planning, stakeholder communication and scenario evaluation.

Developing decision support systems for sustainable transitions at the societal level is a complex undertaking due to the high number of stakeholders involved, the urgency of problems that needs to be addressed, and the uncertainty of information linked to decisions. A mismatch between the technological tools offered for decision support and the real needs of practitioners and society at large has been observed. In order to address these challenges, several approaches are explored under the theoretical framework of post-normal science, including co-creative developmental design, soft systems thinking and models for technology integration.

In this chapter, the CapSEM toolbox is explored, applied, and evaluated in the context of transportation planning and policy-making. Transportation system elements are analyzed across all four CapSEM levels to identify relevant tools to utilize in decision support systems to address sustainability in the sector. The toolbox is applied to a strategic transportation planning case study. The application demonstrates how the framework may be used to structure and stack models across system and performance levels to handle transportation modeling and stakeholder complexity.