孪生空间及其应用-兼论地理研究空间的重构

The past two years have witnessed an explosive growth of digital twin research and its increasing application in a wide range of fields and scales. This urgently calls for a methodological framework to guide and consolidate the research and application of digital twin in various fields and with different structures and scales. In this paper, we first summarized and analyzed the development patterns of digital twin research in various fields, and then coined a term "digital twin space" (with definition and characteristics) as a framework to generalize and consolidate digital twins of various scales. Taking digital twin city as an example, we briefly elaborated the application of twin space. Space, as the carrier of the research object or the research object itself in geography, consists of natural geographical space, social space, and cyberspace. These three types of spaces, however, have not been fully integrated in different branches of geography. In order to boost comprehensive geography research, we propose to reconstruct geographical space research by integrating the three types of geographical spaces with the twin space. Digital twin space can interact with the physical space bilaterally in real time and thus break the barriers among the three types of geographical spaces from inside, which further helps realize the tasks of simulating realities, predicting changes, and regulating processes in integrated geography research.