Across the public and private sectors, digital twins and advanced geospatial data are transforming how infrastructure is monitored, managed, and strengthened against emerging risks. This session explores innovative applications of 3D modeling, remote sensing, and data integration that enhance resilience, efficiency, and decision-making across utility, municipal, and transportation networks. Presentations will highlight how multi-resolution reality capture, lidar, UAV data, and predictive modeling are being used to create dynamic digital environments that support proactive maintenance, climate risk assessment, and long-term planning. Attendees will gain insights into how combining geospatial intelligence with real-time monitoring and analytics enables organizations to better understand system vulnerabilities, optimize operations, and prepare for future challenges.
The following presentations will be shared in this session:
Blending Reality Mapping Capture Methods for Living Digital Twins
Presented by Andrew Carey, Esri
This presentation will outline ETM’s deployment of low-altitude UAVs and ground-based techniques to generate a dynamic digital twin for Central Florida’s municipalities. The methodology integrates multi-resolution reality capture, including imagery and lidar, with GIS datasets to enable asset-specific decision support. The platform also incorporates real-time sensor data and autonomous vehicle inputs, providing stakeholders with a unified, web-accessible environment for project management and analysis.
Vegetation Risk and Energy Grid Resiliency: Practical Digital Twin Strategies
Presented by Greg Itzstein, Pointerra
Grid infrastructure across the United States is increasingly vulnerable to sustained wind events, necessitating an acceleration to analyze and predict the threat and impact of regional climate events. The Department of Energy, under the Grid Resilience and Climate Change Impacts (GRACI) program, is sponsoring a study in the Northeast led by Pointerra, combining utility and academic experience and expertise to construct predictive models to help support establishing industry-wide best practices for mitigating the likelihood and impact of vegetation-induced outages. Pointerra will present findings that the combination of high-resolution 3D remote sensing data, digital twins, unifying multiple utility managed infrastructure data sources and leading university modeling enables faster, more accurate, more prescriptive definition of risk to support per-asset level grid resiliency initiatives at network network-wide scales.
Advanced AI Solutions for Electric Utility Infrastructure Inspection
Presented by Russ Ellis, gNext Labs
This presentation explores the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and drone-based data collection in modernizing electric utility infrastructure inspections.
By integrating drone technology with advanced photogrammetry and cloud computing, utilities can perform inspections with greater efficiency, accuracy, and safety. A cloud-based platform generates high-resolution digital twins of infrastructure assets, enabling precise detection, quantification, and evaluation of defects across a wide range of asset types.
AI-powered analysis automates defect identification and supports scalable, data-driven assessments. This enhances the accuracy of evaluations and enables proactive maintenance strategies. Visualization of changes over time adds an additional layer of insight, strengthening long-term asset health monitoring.
Rather than replacing existing methods, this approach significantly enhances them. It improves asset management for both electric generation and distribution utilities, as well as their supporting engineering firms. The presentation will highlight real-world use cases to demonstrate the practical benefits and effectiveness of this technology.
3D Visualization of Land Cover and Urban Morphology Using Open-Source Geospatial Tools
Presented by Moustapha Farah, DijbCarto
This presentation will showcase how open-source geospatial tools, including Leafmap and Google Earth Engine, can be used to build interactive 3D representations of land cover and urban environments. Using MapLibre GL’s 3D rendering capabilities, the workflow integrates digital elevation models (DEM) to visualize terrain relief and employs building extrusion techniques to represent urban structures in realistic detail. Combined with global datasets such as ESA WorldCover, these layers create immersive 3D visualizations that reveal both natural and built landscapes in a single interactive environment.
By leveraging the analytical power of Google Earth Engine and the visualization flexibility of Leafmap, this approach enables a deeper understanding of spatial and temporal dynamics — supporting urban planning, environmental assessment, and digital twin applications. The talk will emphasize how these innovations are achievable entirely through open and reproducible geospatial workflows, without the need for proprietary software.
