A BIM-Based Digital Twin Framework for Urban Roads. Integrating MMS and Municipal Geospatial Data for AI-Ready Urban Infrastructure Management

Digital twins (DTs) are increasingly adopted to enhance the monitoring, management, and planning of urban infrastructure. While DT development for buildings is well established, applications to urban road networks remain limited, particularly in integrating heterogeneous geospatial datasets into semantically rich, multi-scale representations. This study presents a methodology for developing a BIM-based DT of urban roads by integrating geospatial data from Mobile Mapping System (MMS) surveys with semantic information from municipal geodatabases. The approach follows a multi-modal (point clouds, imagery, vector data), multi-scale and multi-level framework, where ‘multi-level’ refers to modeling at different scopes—from a city-wide level, offering a generalized representation of the entire road network, to asset-level detail, capturing parametric BIM elements for individual road segments or specific components such as road sign and road marker, lamp posts and traffic light. MMS-derived LiDAR point clouds allow accurate 3D reconstruction of road surfaces, curbs, and ancillary infrastructure, while municipal geodatabases enrich the model with thematic layers including pavement condition, road classification, and street furniture. The resulting DT framework supports multi-scale visualization, asset management, and predictive maintenance. By combining geometric precision with semantic richness, the proposed methodology delivers an interoperable and scalable framework for sustainable urban road management, providing a foundation for AI-ready applications such as automated defect detection, traffic simulation, and predictive maintenance planning. The resulting DT achieved a geometric accuracy of ±3 cm and integrated more than 45 km of urban road network, enabling multi-scale analyses and AI-ready data fusion.