Benidorm launches its first Gemelo digital (digital twin) project to calculate its floating population and improve the management of public services.

Benidorm City Council has launched a project, Gemelo digital, to gain a more accurate understanding of the city’s floating population and optimise the management of public services. To achieve this, it will use iris360, Libelium’s data intelligence platform. Specifically, the company has implemented a solution tailored to Benidorm, based on a centralised data lake incorporating information from water meters, mobile phones, the population census, visitor flows and parking, among other sources. This will allow the city to simulate visitor-flow scenarios, validate the actual presence of visitors and anticipate the city’s operational response in real time.

Mayor Toni Pérez recalled that the project has been developed as part of the “Verde Benidorm” Sustainable Tourism Plan at Destination (PSTD), funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU funds under the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.

Toni Pérez explained that “this new tool, our digital twin, enables us to become increasingly efficient in our management by anticipating potential needs and scenarios, and by adjusting and adapting municipal action to the actual population present at any given time. As a result, we can achieve better planning and a faster, more accurate response.”

Specifically, Libelium’s solution will address two priority use cases for the city. The first is service efficiency, as the solution will enable the city to scale its municipal resources based on the actual population, not only registered residents but also tourists and visitors. This will ensure that water, street cleaning and essential services are accurately aligned with daily needs.

The second priority area is event security. The ability to simulate visitor flow at events, taking into account both the local population and day-trippers who do not stay overnight, will allow authorities to proactively plan security and emergency logistics. This will transform crowd management into a controlled and safer process.

Advanced Data Intelligence
The technological infrastructure will be able to process a large volume of information from key services, including, for example, around 15,000 weekly water consumption data points. These consumption patterns will be cross-referenced with anonymised mobile phone data and census information to establish an accurate indicator (ground truth) of the actual population at any given time. This ground truth is the data that the AI will use to train the system and correct discrepancies between the registered population and the actual density of people in the city.

“This is the most complex, ambitious and realistic project we have undertaken at Libelium, both because of the volume and frequency of the data being ingested, which requires the implementation of new data quality, security and standardisation standards, and because of its strategic value in one of the most tourist-oriented municipalities in our country,” says Iris Cuevas, the project manager.

In addition, the iris360 platform is interoperable with SEGITTUR’s central node, meaning it will be able to connect directly to the Alicante and Benidorm PID platforms to integrate a broader range of urban data sources, such as beach visitor numbers or vehicle traffic through computer vision systems, connecting all the layers of the city.

The project involves MásOrange, Veolia, Visit Benidorm, Telefónica, Datadish, the Hotel and Tourism Business Association of the Valencian Community (HOSBEC), and Benidorm City Council.

About Libelium
Libelium is a strategic technology consultancy specialising in accelerating the transition towards sustainability through environmental intelligence. After establishing itself as a global leader in IoT hardware, the company has evolved towards a high-value consulting model that combines strategic vision with proprietary technology through its iris360 platform.

Libelium promotes “datocracy” to help public and private organisations monitor their environmental footprint, optimise resources and anticipate climate challenges through digital twins and predictive analytics.