A digital twin in Dubai for the buildings that keep the city moving

In July 2026 Dubai Municipality launched its Dubai Digital Twin Platform, a continuously updated 3D model of the emirate’s buildings, infrastructure and public assets that government teams use for planning. A model like that knows where a warehouse stands and what shape it is. It does not know which rack inside is short, which cold room is drifting or which pallet has sat in a staging lane since the morning shift.

That inner layer is what Spatial Map covers. It is an independent product, it is not part of the municipality platform and it does not connect to it. An owner or operator maps their own building, binds their own data to it and decides who sees it. For what we mean by the term, and where a live operations twin differs from a simulation, see digital twin software for buildings.

The Jebel Ali Free Zone (JAFZA) sits beside Jebel Ali Port, and much of its warehousing is multi-client: one building, many owners of the stock inside. The hard questions in such a building are rarely “how many” — the WMS knows that — but “where exactly, since when, and what happened to it”. A twin answers them with history. Every change to a table row is kept, and a data link set to Historical movement adds a History player that replays a pallet’s reads door by door.

Consignees can be given their own view without a login: a read-only share link limited to their layers and floors, or a public read-only link to a report, exported as PDF, Excel, CSV or JSON when they want a file. An alert rule such as “matches for 120 minutes” on the staging-lane table raises an in-app alert for pallets that have waited too long, and Show on map takes the supervisor straight to them.

Dubai South is the district around Al Maktoum International Airport (DWC). Its Logistics District has direct access to the airport’s cargo terminals and includes the EZDubai e-commerce free zone and a contract-logistics zone, and in 2024 Dubai approved plans to expand DWC into a much larger passenger airport over the coming years. New warehouses and fulfilment centres are being built there now.

A new building is the easiest one to twin, because the drawings are fresh. Upload the plan, align it, and AI Map drafts walls, doors, racks, labels and areas for the whole floor or a rectangle of it; you review the drafts on the map and add them, then connect the WMS and readers. AI Map is available on paid plans and the trial, with a monthly limit. See the AI floor plan mapping page for how drafting and review work.

Dubai International (DXB) is one of the world’s busiest airports for international passengers, and the city’s largest malls stack shops, cinemas, car parks and service corridors over several levels. In both, the question “how do I get from here to there” crosses floors. Spatial Map routes across floors through stairs, lifts and escalators, with Fastest, Step-free and Other route options, turn-by-turn steps, walking minutes and the floor changes on the way. It does not show a live blue dot for the visitor.

For the operations team the same twin carries heatmaps: footfall from your counters or positions from your RTLS, several layers in their own colours, with heat that stops at walls and closed doors. The Silverbay Airport and Retail Mart demos show the terminal and multi-floor store patterns.

Dubai shift teams are mixed: a supervisor reading Arabic, a planner in English, a contractor in another language. Each user picks one of six interface languages. With Ask AI (beta), anyone with access can type a plain question about the open facility — “how many pallets are in staging lane 4?”, “which cold rooms raised an alert today?” — and get an answer drawn from its tables, with links that show the items on the map.

Ask AI is read-only. Personal values are masked before the model sees them, each workspace has a monthly question limit, and owners and admins can review a log of questions with ratings.