Digital Twin Empowering Whole-Lifecycle Governance of Urban Infrastructure: A Review of Technological Embedding, Organizational Change, and Institutional Reconstruction

Abstract

As a frontier direction of engineering informatics, Digital Twin technology offers new technical possibilities for the whole-lifecycle governance of urban infrastructure. However, existing research mostly treats Digital Twin as a pure engineering system optimization tool, neglecting its governance attributes as a “Socio-technical System.” Based on the systematic literature review method, this paper retrieves relevant literature from databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and CNKI between 2010 and 2025; systematically reviews the application evolution of Digital Twin technology in urban infrastructure across the planning, construction, operation and maintenance, and decommissioning stages from the three dimensions of technological embedding, organizational change, and institutional reconstruction; reveals the transmission mechanism through which technological capabilities are transformed into governance effectiveness via organizational mediation; identifies key existing research limitations in current research regarding data governance, cross-sector collaboration, and institutional adaptation; and proposes an integrative three-dimensional “Technological Embedding—Organizational Change—Institutional Reconstruction” analytical framework. This study finds that the core challenge of Digital Twin governance lies in coordinating the structural tension between technological centralization and governance decentralization; future research needs to transcend technological determinism, situate Digital Twin within a broader socio-technical system context, and achieve the substantive transformation from “technology empowerment” to “governance effectiveness.”