The city of Raleigh, North Carolina, is deploying an advanced combination of drones and artificial-intelligence-enabled tools to build a comprehensive virtual version of itself. As one of the fastest-growing metropolises in the United States, the local government is turning to these modern technological solutions to address complex contemporary urban challenges and help chart a sustainable path for the future.
Long recognized as the vibrant hub of the state’s high-tech Research Triangle region, Raleigh has collaborated closely with prominent tech industry partners, including Esri, NVIDIA, and Microsoft, to construct a high-fidelity digital twin of the city. Municipal leaders intend for this virtual replica to serve as a critical instrument in managing pressing local issues, most notably traffic congestion and comprehensive urban development planning.
The push for such advanced digital modeling stems directly from the community’s evolving needs and everyday concerns. City officials routinely gather feedback from residents to gauge local priorities and identify areas requiring municipal intervention.
"We do a citizen survey every two years and ask citizens all sorts of questions about their priorities and concerns. Development and traffic come up as the top two pretty regularly," Jim Alberque, the city’s geographic information system (GIS) and emerging technology manager, said in an interview.
"I think the benefit of the digital twin, what it’s given the city in our ability to communicate with our community, is that we don’t have to tell you the story, we can show you the story of the city," Alberque added.
Drone Data Powers Planning for Parks, Events, and Tree Preservation
One of the city’s most practical and recent applications of drone-captured data involved aiding in the master planning and development of Gipson Play Plaza. This expansive project is an 18.5-acre recreational and community gathering destination situated squarely within the larger 300-acre Dorothea Dix Park.
"We did flights of that to be able to generate 3D mesh and orthographic images, to be able to show what that park was like, to be able to communicate that and tell that story," said Jeff Dawson, the city’s technology and analytics manager.
Building on the success of these initial aerial surveys, city officials are actively exploring how to leverage digital-twin technology for municipal event planning. By utilizing accurate virtual environments, planners can ensure that a physical space selected for a specific public gathering is adequately sized to accommodate the event’s exact needs, eliminating the guesswork of estimating capacities or making assumptions about whether a temporary structure will fit comfortably on a given site.
Another vital application of the technology assists the city’s facility planners in selecting optimal locations for future municipal construction projects. This careful siting process allows officials to design new infrastructure in a manner that preserves the greatest possible number of mature, stately trees across the locality.
"Trees are very big in Raleigh; the ‘City of Oaks,’" Dawson noted.
Operating on the cutting edge of municipal technology, Raleigh is also beginning to integrate various other data-collection devices into the broader framework of the digital twin. By pulling in information from traditional Internet of Things (IoT) devices deployed throughout the community—ranging from static street-level cameras to dynamic, moving objects like shared scooters and municipal vehicles—the city aims to achieve a significantly higher-fidelity view of urban operations in real time.
Early Adopter of Drones
The municipality’s current technological sophistication is built upon years of foundational experience, as Raleigh was an early adopter of uncrewed aerial systems. The city’s Parks Department initiated its very first drone program back in 2018, establishing an internal precedent for aerial data collection. Meanwhile, the information technology department launched its own dedicated drone program approximately two years ago.
Dawson explained that the city has intentionally maintained a decentralized operational structure when it comes to managing and flying its drones.
"We have drones in IT, in Raleigh Parks and Raleigh Water, and then the police department has a large fleet of drones," he said. "They’re more on their own, because of the law enforcement nature of it, it’s a little bit different from how the rest of us are operating."
To maintain the pipeline of data feeding the digital twin project, the civilian side of the city government currently relies on a core fleet consisting of four drones: three U.S.-made Freefly Astros and one Mavic product. Dawson noted that approximately two years ago, faced with potential federal restrictions regarding the procurement and use of Chinese-manufactured drone technology, Raleigh officials made a deliberate policy decision to gradually transition and replace their existing inventory with National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)-compliant alternatives, such as the Astro.
"It was an end-of-life thing. We were looking for something that was Blue Listed and that’s when we came across the Astro and started heading down that route, and then adopted them across the board," Dawson explained.
Novel Use of AI Technology
Alberque emphasized that the city, drawing naturally on its deep roots within the tech-savvy Research Triangle ecosystem, was among the earliest municipal governments in the country to fully embrace artificial intelligence as a core operational capability.
"We use standard operations to capture imagery. We then take that imagery and use Esri technology to create derivative products," he said, noting that these outputs typically include detailed orthophotos and comprehensive 3D meshes. "So, obviously there’s a bunch of AI on board."
When the digital-twin initiative was first conceived, city leaders determined that because Raleigh was expanding at such a rapid pace, the initial priority for the technology should focus squarely on modeling the community’s evolving urban form.
"What does the city look like today? What is it going to look like tomorrow? And what might it look like in a year?" Alberque asked, highlighting the forward-looking nature of the municipal modeling efforts.
As the digital twin project matured and expanded its capabilities, city leaders discovered a host of additional, highly specialized uses for the virtual infrastructure. Among these is micro-weather modeling, which seeks to understand hyper-local atmospheric conditions across different neighborhoods.
"We’re working with a firm around doing some micro-weather modeling that takes into effect climate data, wind patterns, those sorts of things, but also using the urban-built environment to model ventilation corridors and wind patterns," Alberque said.
Ultimately, however, the most transformative aspect of the digital twin initiative may lie in its capacity to translate complex municipal data into a narrative format that ordinary citizens can easily understand. By providing a clear window into planning, zoning, and transit initiatives, the city has turned raw geographical data into an engaging public communication platform.
"We found that it’s a really valuable tool to do storytelling," Alberque concluded. "We’re leveraging GIS as a platform for our digital twin. We can then incorporate other data and use that as a platform for storytelling, whether that be around some environmental-modeling things or some operational things related to our transit service."
