On August 12, 2022, at the China Geospatial Information Industry Conference's sub-forum on spatiotemporal big data and digital transformation in natural resource management, Mr. Zhou Yuanjin, Vice President of Beijing Brilliant Technology Co., Ltd., delivered a keynote speech titled "Digital Twins: Building the Infrastructure of the Metaverse." Mr. Zhou provided an in-depth sharing on the concept of the metaverse, its development prospects, and the practical applications and implementations of the metaverse and digital twins in the field of new infrastructure, which garnered attention and praise from numerous experts and leaders.

Mr. Zhou noted that since 2021, the metaverse has become the darling of the market and a hot pursuit for capital. According to estimates by McKinsey & Company, in the first five months of 2022, enterprises, private equity firms, and venture capitalists accumulated cross-sector investments totaling $120 billion. It is predicted that by 2030, the global metaverse's annual revenue could reach $13 trillion, with China's metaverse market size reaching $8 trillion. However, based on the current state of technological development, the metaverse is still in its early stages. As a foundational technology for building the metaverse, digital twins have undergone more than a decade of development and practice and have been widely applied in new infrastructure areas such as smart cities, smart transportation, smart energy, and smart water conservancy.

Digital twins are an effective means of achieving the integration of information and physical worlds. On one hand, digital twins can support the virtual-to-physical mapping and bidirectional interaction between the physical world of manufacturing and the information world, thereby forming a real-time intelligent closed loop of "data perception, real-time analysis, intelligent decision-making, and operational simulation." On the other hand, digital twins can fully interact and deeply integrate physical actual data such as operational status, environmental changes, and sudden disturbances with information space data such as simulation predictions and statistical analysis, thereby enhancing the synchronization and consistency between the physical and information worlds.

In the field of smart civil aviation, relying on technologies such as digital twins, GIS, BIM, IoT, big data, and artificial intelligence, it is possible to integrate, fuse, model, and simulate airport geographic information data, spatiotemporal big data, and location big data. This enables the acquisition and display of spatial entity information resources of airports in the air, on the ground, on the surface, underground, indoors, and outdoors, achieving situational awareness and panoramic visualization of airport operations. It effectively empowers applications at various levels such as the decision-making layer, management layer, operational layer, and operational layer of the airport, continuously guiding the continuous improvement of airport safety, operational efficiency, and service experience.

For example, a large domestic airport using the Boen Digital Twin Airport Platform has reduced the time required for resource allocation and dispatch of flights and support vehicles from the hour level to the minute level. The usage rate of passenger jet bridges has increased by 3%-5%, with approximately 5,000 more passengers using jet bridges to enter the airport daily, and the average entry time for each passenger has been reduced by 10-15 minutes. The taxiing time for departing flights has been reduced by an average of about 2.09 minutes. Based on the airport's daily operation of 500 departing flights, approximately 9.75 tons of fuel can be saved each day.

In terms of airport asset management, it has been difficult for airports to real-time monitor the operation status of terminal building water networks, power grids, video surveillance, network communications, and various facilities and equipment. This often leads to challenges in tracking the specific location of equipment and facility failures, and in grasping the exact location of emergencies at the first moment, which poses significant obstacles to the maintenance and management of assets. The Brilliant Digital Twin Asset Management System differs from traditional asset ledger management systems. It is a location-based visualization asset management system that can promptly identify fault points and alarm points based on location information. Additionally, it can visually display the entire operation status of assets, including energy consumption statistics, surveillance videos, pipeline status, and passenger and personnel density. This enables full lifecycle management of assets, including location tracking, maintenance, and status monitoring across the entire scenario map and between building floors.

Furthermore, in terms of simulation training, the Brilliant Digital Twin Airport Platform, leveraging holographic 3D services, provides a virtual airport system for simulation training. It offers air traffic control simulation training and vehicle driving simulation, enabling staff to become familiar with job requirements and to coordinate operations across various positions. Through VR devices, airport employees can undergo training and drills within the system and complete the corresponding operations.

The core value of Brilliant  digital twin airport lies in the simulation model, which comprehensively, real-time, and integrally connects various static and dynamic data such as aircraft, passengers, vehicles, and facilities and equipment. By collecting, cleaning, organizing, analyzing, and predicting data, it can fully and accurately grasp the overall operational situation of the airport. Combining new technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, airport business applications are developed, including a three-dimensional electronic sandbox system, high-precision surface comprehensive monitoring system, pipeline and network system, visual security monitoring system, taxiway planning, operational simulation, emergency rescue management, and airside operation management system. This truly achieves operational visualization, efficient management, and intelligent decision-making.

In the future, the digital twin visualization platform developed based on Brilliant digital twin operating system BLinkOS will be applied to more sub-fields of new infrastructure industries. It will facilitate information interconnectivity between smart industry clusters and promote digital upgrades in various fields under the wave of new infrastructure development.