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Towards Resilient Cities through Digital Coupled Human, nAture and INfrastructure Systems (CHAINS)
18 March 2026
This webinar will present data-driven digital twin research to build resilient cities.
DescriptionWorldwide, cities face unprecedented pressures to provide adequate resources, infrastructure, services, and resilience plans against climate change. The overarching goal of urban management and development (UMD) is to benefit all human beings while mitigating environmental impacts to a maximum extent for the good of the planet and the quality of life it promotes. Digital innovations like Digital Twins (DTs) have emerged as promising tools for tackling UMD challenges by enabling data-driven decision-making, predictive modelling, and scenario analysis. Given the consensus that DTs fundamentally depend on data to mirror cities, here, based on over 10 years’ study, we define a DT from a data perspective as a dynamic virtual representation integrating heterogeneous data sources to capture the city's complexity across three key dimensions: (1) physical assets and city form, (2) processes, services and systems, and (3) human activities. It enables real-time monitoring, predictive modelling, and informed decision-making for UMD. Accordingly, my research talk will cover three perspectives from twinning the cities towards resilient cities: (1) proposing multi-modal data-driven digital twinning processes and further supporting automatically updating semantic and information-rich DTs; (2) developing the ‘Five-layer Multi-scale Digital Twin Theory (FMDTT) - People’ to build the bidirectional relationships between the physical and digital worlds, and further create the feedback loops with people; (3) protecting all road networks and users from destructive climate hazard chains through the dynamic people-centric ‘Road-Flood-User CHAINS (Coupled Human, nAture and INfrastructure Systems)’ digital twin, further toward next-generation resilient cities. Together, the whole research map offers a pathway to align DT development towards global sustainability goals. Moreover, future directions and possible solutions will also be presented. |
Speakers
Prof. Qiuchen Lu
Professor in Digital Built Asset Management at The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London (UCL)
Prof. Lu has secured over £1.4 million as PI/Co-PI and contributed to projects over £3.4 million as Co-I, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng), British Standards Institution (BSI) etc. She awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng)/Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship in 2024/2025, one of the most prestigious awards in the UK, which supports the most talented researchers across engineering fields and awarded only seven fellowships yearly. She also awarded the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) Young Scientist Scheme by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), where limited outstanding researchers can be awarded globally every five years. Within the domain of digital built environment, she has authored more than 75 peer-reviewed publications and four books, including the Digital Twins in the Built Environment: Fundamentals, principles and applications (ICE Publishing). Her methodological and theoretical contributions - particularly the Five-layer Multi-scale Digital Twin Theory (FMDTT) - are widely adopted in industry and academia across multiple scales, from buildings and hospitals to road networks and port infrastructure.
Moreover, Prof. Lu acts as the International Collaboration Coordinator of the European Group for Intelligent Computing in Engineering (EG-ICE), and a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge and leads international collaborations across Europe and Asia. She acted as the guest editors and reviewers of multiple SCI-indexed journals, including Cities and Advanced Engineering Informatics