Cyprus Digital Twin

Cyprus Digital Twin (CyDT)

The Cyprus Digital Twin (CyDT) is a national, data-driven platform that supports the resilience and management of Cyprus’ critical infrastructure systems. It provides a continuously evolving virtual representation of interconnected infrastructures, enabling stakeholders to analyze system behavior, assess risks, and evaluate scenarios related to natural hazards, technological failures, and cascading disruptions. CyDT addresses a key limitation of existing digital twin initiatives by integrating power, water, transportation, telecommunications, and emergency response systems within a unified, scenario-driven and risk-based framework. By combining real-world data with advanced simulation models, the platform delivers actionable insights for both operational and strategic decision-making.

The platform maintains continuous data ingestion from heterogeneous sources, including IoT sensors, geospatial repositories, open data portals, and operational databases, and integrates them with physics-based and data-driven models. This enables real-time monitoring as well as parameterized “what-if” scenario simulations, allowing decision-makers to evaluate response strategies before implementation. A core strength of CyDT is its explicit modeling of cross-sector interdependencies. Rather than examining infrastructures in isolation, the platform captures how disruptions propagate across systems, revealing cascading effects and supporting more effective resilience planning at national scale.

Capabilities

Power System Resilience to Wildfires

Analysis of power system resilience to wildfires examines the interaction between fire propagation, complex terrain, and electricity infrastructure. Wildfire evolution is simulated using high-resolution land cover data, physics-based fire behavior models, and terrain-aware wind fields, enabling the identification of power assets at imminent risk, including transmission lines and substations. The resulting analysis supports proactive mitigation strategies and reveals cascading impacts on dependent infrastructures, enhancing preparedness and operational resilience under extreme wildfire conditions.

Power–Telecommunications Resilience to Windstorms

Evaluation of the joint resilience of power and telecommunication infrastructures to windstorms considers the effects of extreme wind events on co-located assets. Synthetic storm scenarios with varying trajectories and intensities are combined with asset-specific fragility models to estimate failure probabilities over time. The spatiotemporal evolution of exposure and failures across both networks highlights how concurrent disruptions can impair emergency communications and prolong recovery, supporting coordinated resilience planning across infrastructure sectors.

Alert/Threshold-Based Monitoring

Monitoring and alerting functionality enables real-time detection of critical environmental and operational conditions across Cyprus. User-defined rules continuously evaluate incoming sensor data, such as wind speed or temperature, and trigger alerts when predefined thresholds are exceeded. Alerts are visualized spatially on the map and archived with temporal metadata, supporting rapid situational awareness, event tracking, and post-event analysis.

Localized Wind Modeling

Localized wind modeling is performed using WindNinja to downscale coarse meteorological data into high-resolution, terrain-aware wind fields. By accounting for topographic effects such as valley channeling and ridge acceleration, the tool provides accurate estimates of wind speed and direction at fine spatial scales. These outputs are essential for assessing wind-driven hazards, including wildfires and windstorm impacts on critical infrastructure.

Pipe Lengths Analysis for Water Networks

Analysis of water distribution infrastructure is supported through automated pipe length calculations within defined District Metered Areas. Spatial queries intersect network geometries with management zones to produce detailed statistics of pipe lengths categorized by diameter. This tool provides a data-driven foundation for infrastructure planning, maintenance prioritization, and resilience assessment of water networks.

Interactive Maps and Dataset Visualization

Visualization of heterogeneous datasets is enabled through interactive, domain-organized maps covering transportation, water, power, environment, and demographics. Static, semi-static, and real-time datasets are rendered as spatial layers with minimal latency, allowing users to explore patterns, relationships, and trends across the island. These maps provide contextual insight and serve as the entry point for scenario development and analytical workflows.