Engineering-practice-oriented digital twins for smart water management: Framework, enabling technologies, and future directions.

Abstract

Urban water systems are increasingly challenged by climate extremes, aging infrastructure, and rising flood risks. Conventional water management practices remain fragmented across data, operations, and assets, limiting coordinated decision-making and scalable engineering deployment. Digital twins (DT) show great promise to overcome this fragmentation for resilient and efficient management. This review proposes an engineering-practice-oriented framework of digital twins for smart water management (DTSW). Utility demands are first structured through a scenario-oriented decomposition into points of interest (POIs), thereby linking practical engineering problems to digital variables. The review further summarizes a probabilistic graphical model-based scheme as the algorithmic backbone for POI implementation, and examines the key enabling technologies across organized data foundations, models, and real-time control. Particular attention is given to AI-empowered DTSW techniques, including soft sensing and data cleansing, hybrid modeling, and uncertainty-aware model deployment. Future development is discussed from the perspectives of proactive optimization, human-digital collaboration, and scalable engineering deployment. This review thus provides a structured framework for guiding the practical design and deployment of DT in urban water systems, facilitating coordinated, scalable and resilient water management.