Pohang City Selected as Digital Twin Pilot Zone... Leading the Global Digital Era

Pohang City Selected for Government Rural Project, Secures 4.7 Billion KRW in National Funding This Year

Digital Twin Service Introduced in Central Guryongpo Port, Closely Linked to Citizens' Daily Lives

Pohang City and North Gyeongsang Province, after being selected last May for the "Digital Twin Pilot Zone Development" project hosted by the Ministry of Science and ICT and organized by the National Information Society Agency (NIA), are accelerating the establishment of a global digital ecosystem.

A digital twin is a virtual model that digitally replicates real-world objects or spaces. By reflecting actual data in the virtual model, this technology can predict and respond to issues in advance and is being applied in various fields such as healthcare, transportation, tourism, and urban development.

In this public contest, which selects one urban and one rural pilot site, North Gyeongsang Province was finally chosen for the rural type together with Pohang City.

Unlike previous digital twin projects, which were sporadically promoted focusing on specific functions, this year’s project?funded by 4.7 billion KRW in national funds?will, for the first time, aggregate and connect digital twin services at the city level to comprehensively solve social problems.

For the rural type, the area around Guryongpo and Homigot in Pohang has been designated as the pilot zone. The project will start this year by building four types of digital twin services in the environmental sector to address social problems faced by fishing villages, including: ▲establishing an integrated digital twin platform ▲developing and linking citizen-oriented services ▲creating a representative export model for digital twins. Over the next three years, the project will expand to tourism and safety sectors.

Guryongpo Port, which opened during the Japanese colonial period and has over a 100-year history, is a representative local fishing port that produces over half of the country’s snow crab. However, since 2015, the catch volume has plummeted, significantly impacting the local economy.

Although the area has seen an increase in visitors after being featured as a filming location for the drama "When the Camellia Blooms," there is still a lack of tourism infrastructure to encourage longer stays.

Pohang City and North Gyeongsang Province plan to visualize 3.5 million pyeong of the area from Guryongpo Port to Homigot as three-dimensional spatial information and provide services on this platform that allow citizens to directly experience the benefits of digital twins.

First, in the environmental sector, services will be established to monitor changes in air and marine environments in real time, predict crises, and issue rapid alerts. By accurately tracking the location of fishing vessels, the project will provide safe entry and departure services even on foggy days, and by linking air and marine data, it will offer optimal entry and departure solutions for fishing vessels to minimize carbon emissions.

In the second and third years, the project will expand to the tourism and safety sectors. For tourism, it will analyze traffic flow and population patterns in Guryongpo Port and Homigot to lay the foundation for user-satisfying tourism services. For safety, it will predict dangerous situations around the port and provide proactive safety response services.

To ensure smooth project execution, an industry-academia-research collaboration system has been established with Pohang Institute of Metal Industry Advancement (POMIA), KT, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Gyeongbuk ICT Convergence Industry Promotion Association, Urban Regeneration Safety Association, and software development companies (ESE, Netro, SEO).

This project aims to develop 12 types of digital twin services as representative export models for global expansion.

Lee Cheolwoo, Governor of North Gyeongsang Province, stated, "It is highly significant that North Gyeongsang Province is implementing the government’s first project to apply digital twins at the city level. We will create a representative digital twin model with global competitiveness and lead the era of digital advancement in North Gyeongsang Province."

Lee Kangdeok, Mayor of Pohang, said, "By utilizing the excellent digital twin technologies and services that Pohang has developed, we will build a differentiated, people-centered integrated platform so that citizens can directly benefit from advanced technologies. We will foster export models based on data to address complex local social issues and take the lead in making Pohang a leading city for Digital Twin Korea."