Meet the Coordinator: TU Delft – Helping Cities Become Climate Resilient with Digital Twins

Delft University of Technology is the largest technical university in the Netherlands. Each year, an average of 350 PhDs graduate from the TU Delft, and we publish nearly 6,000 journal articles, conference papers, and books. Recognised with the HR Excellence in Research award by the European Commission, TU Delft is ranked 56th in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024 and 13th globally in Engineering and Technology.

The university maintains strong ties to industry, with many successful spin-offs emerging from its research ecosystem.

To learn more about TU Delft, visit their website: tudelft.nl

TU Delft's Role in UrbanAIR

TU Delft leads UrbanAIR and contributes to its scientific and technical foundations. The multi-disciplinary team at TU Delft works on:

• Reconstructing urban geometry for accurate representation of city environments

• Simulating urban wind patterns while accounting for uncertainty in meteorological data

• Quantifying uncertainty in simulations of urban air temperature and atmospheric flow, and assimilating observations to improve estimates of atmospheric conditions

• Developing behaviourally-rich agent-based models to understand how people adapt to climate-induced heat and how people's behaviours change in response to extreme heat and poor air quality

• Supporting scenario-based decision support and explainability tools to help cities interpret and act on climate data

These contributions shape UrbanAIR’s digital twin, making it a practical and science-based tool for sustainable urban planning, informed decision-making, and climate resilience. 

By simulating how urban infrastructure, climate dynamics, and public behaviour interact under stress, TU Delft helps ensure UrbanAIR delivers insights that are actionable and equitable—supported by a decision support tool that helps translate complex climate and behavioural data into clear, actionable strategies for cities.

The TU Delft Team

The work is carried out by a diverse and collaborative team, including many outstanding scientists and engineers driving forward innovation in climate science and technology. The team includes leading women researchers such as Femke Vossepoel, Clara García-Sánchez, Jantien Stoter, Tina Comes, Amineh Ghorbani, Tatiana Filatova, Anna Gralka alongside pier siebesma.

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