BMC begins process to create virtual model of entire Mumbai city

This 3D model, a “digital twin” of Mumbai, will have complete details of roads, bridges, flyovers, underpasses and tunnels, buildings, modes of transport, gardens and open spaces, water bodies, all civic amenities, street lights, traffic signals, trees, landscape, airports and slums.

Once ready, this will help in urban planning for development and infrastructure projects, disaster management, environment analysis, classification of buildings and assessment of amenities. It will help visualise the city in 3D with comprehensive 360-degree views, enabling simulations to derive impact areas and detailed data analysis.

The BMC will map changes in the city year-on-year with geospatial technology. Change detection is expected to be used for insights into unauthorised and illegal settlements.

The project will be taken up by the BMC’s information technology department, which will appoint a contractor that has previously worked on similar projects. A request for proposal (RFP) for the project was published by the civic body earlier this month. The project is expected to be completed in more than 18 months. The area to be surveyed is approximately 500 square kilometres — Mumbai’s area is approximately 480 sq km and a buffer space is required for the survey.

The BMC expects to create 360-degree panoramic street view imagery of Mumbai, 3-D reality mesh model, depth data of all water bodies like rivers, lakes and ponds, which is called bathymetric data, land use land cover map and a horizontal and vertical change detection map. A demonstration of its use will also be created for scenarios involving disaster management, fire brigade, roads and bridges, property tax, development planning, encroachment detection and utilities.

Last September, the BMC completed 3D mapping of Worli, largely restricting the project to areas covered by the G/South administrative ward. A senior civic official from the IT department said, “This also worked as proof of concept and has been helpful in development and infrastructure planning. The data is largely being used at the ward level for planning and during infrastructure work.”

Surveys include aerial photogrammetry, which enables mapping of distances and measurements between objects, (light detection and ranging) LiDAR survey and change detection with the help of geospatial technology, which includes use of geographic information system (GIS), remote sensing (RS) and global positioning system (GPS).

BMC in its RFP said, “While the world we live in is 3-dimensional in nature, planning and development activities encompassing urban governance, city infrastructure upgrades are still being carried out on 2D maps. To meet the demands of cities in the 21st century, it is imperative that urban governments can visualise cities in 3D for comprehensive 360-degree views, undertake simulations and conduct detailed analysis on the data, all of which is inefficient and close to impossible on archaic 2D maps.”