From September 2 to 5, 2025, Alexander Bong, employee at the University of Applied Sciences Dresden (HTW Dresden), Faculty of Geoinformation, took part in the 20th International 3D GeoInfo Conference and the 9th International Smart Data and Smart Cities Conference in Tokyo. The participation was part of the MPSC project "Digital urban heavy rain twin and environmental monitoring".

In his presentation entitled "Digital Urban Twins for heavy rain events - An open source QGIS plugin for machine learning classification of residential buildings using CityGML with additional datasets", Bong presented the development of an open source tool that supports the automated classification of residential buildings. It is based on geometric, topological and semantic features from CityGML data, which are combined with additional datasets and evaluated using machine learning. The aim is to further develop urban twins for the simulation and evaluation of heavy rainfall events and make them usable in practice.

During the conference, Alexander Bong exchanged ideas with national and international specialist groups working on similar topics. It became clear that Dresden processes particularly extensive data in an international comparison: The entire urban area serves as the study area - with a significantly higher number of building classes than in many other projects.

With this research, Dresden is strengthening its role as a pioneer in digital urban development and in the use of innovative technologies for climate adaptation.