When Dennis Keeley joined the Dublin Fire Brigade in 1986, he was quickly introduced to a key piece of data-gathering technology. “We had this 6-inch nail in our control center where we’d impale and store the paper records of emergency calls as they came in,” he recalls. While technology has advanced dramatically during Keeley’s career, the reliance on paper and the difficulty of transitioning to scalable digital systems have long hindered data-driven innovation in emergency management.
Fast forward 38 years, and Keeley, now chief of the Dublin Fire Brigade in Ireland, is leading a game-changing project called Digital Twin for Emergency Response. “Effective firefighting involves complex data,” Keeley says. “Only now has software and hardware evolved to the point that they are truly firefighter friendly.”
Dennis Keeley, Chief Fire Officer of the Dublin Fire Brigade.Responsible for the safety of 1.5 million residents across County Dublin, the fire brigade is embracing Bentley Systems’ iTwin Experience to develop a cloud-based digital twin of the city’s urban landscape. The platform can integrate diverse data—building layouts, drone imagery, sensor inputs, fire hydrant locations and much more—into a single, easy-to-use interface, making critical information instantly accessible to firefighting officers.
The idea for the Digital Twin for Emergency Response project grew out of initial collaborations in 2019 between Bentley Systems and the Dublin City Council. At the time, the council’s Smart City team, which seeks was testing next-generation city modeling techniques and visualization tools in the docklands area of the city. At an internal innovation networking event, one of the fire brigade’s Organizational Intelligence Unit team members spotted an opportunity to apply these tools to pre-incident planning. Such experimentation and collaboration is a fundamental part of Smart Dublin, a regional initiative launched in 2016 by the local authorities in Dublin to bring technology providers, researchers and citizens together to transform public services.
Through the umbrella of Smart Dublin, the City Council has developed a model to accelerate its smart city projects through district-based initiatives such as Smart Docklands, a testbed for future connectivity, 3D modeling and digital twins. Another initiative is Smart Dublin City University, or Smart DCU, a program where the Dublin City University campus in the city’s Glasnevin neighborhood serves as a “smart city sandbox,” a small-scale urban environment perfect for testing and refining cutting-edge innovations before broader implementation.
“The fire service is one of the most exciting use cases for digital twins that I’ve seen in a long time,” says Jamie Cudden, the Smart City Program Manager at Dublin City Council. “Digital twins create a whole new way to develop situational awareness.”
Pre-incident planning for firefighting has long relied on paper-based systems. All significant buildings and high-risk sites like chemical plants or hospitals require detailed, up-to-date pre-incident plans. But these plans are often labor-intensive to create and quickly become outdated. What’s more, accessing them in an emergency means sifting through physical folders and files—a process that can be slow and impractical.
Digital Twin for Emergency Response, also known as DTER, could transform this process. The system is expected to reduce the time required for pre-incident planning from an estimated 7,500 hours to just 1,500 hours for 3,000 of Dublin’s high-risk sites. Plus, officers trained on the system can retrieve essential information in just 12 seconds—a game-changer when every second counts.
“When a fire engine arrives, officers need to spend time assessing the visible risk. For complex or large-scale incidents, it can take time to gather the relevant information,” says Rob Howell of the Dublin Fire Brigade’s Organizational Intelligence Unit. “With a digital twin, they’ll be able to instantly access information about what’s inside, behind and around the building—including hidden hazards—streamlining decisions and improving safety.”
Firefighters will also be able to toggle information layers on and off depending on the nature of the incident, such as focusing on building layouts, hazardous material storage or utility shutoff points. The added control ensures that firefighters see only the most relevant data in high-pressure situations.
Bentley Chief Executive Officer Nicholas Cumins (center) with the Dublin Fire Brigade.One of DTER’s first testbeds was an industrial site, where Dublin fire officials collaborated with Bentley and the site’s owners to create a high-fidelity 3D digital model. They integrated drone imagery and company-shared sensor data, including amounts of hazardous substances stored, and demonstrated how digital twins could precisely model high-risk environments. “Our wider risk area, Dublin County, is awash with data,” says Keeley, the local fire chief. “This is a golden opportunity to work with the wider Smart Dublin ecosystem of partners to combine the many strands of information out there into one usable, single source of truth.”
The possibilities extend beyond incident response. “There’s enormous potential for digital twins in firefighter training,” says Howell, the fire brigade’s intelligence unit official. At Smart DCU, Insight Centre for Data Analytics (Insight), researchers are already dropping the Dublin digital twin into gaming engines, using Google 3D Tiles to create highly accurate virtual reality experiences.
“Our typical training happens in controlled environments, but it involves real smoke, real flames and real danger,” Howell says. “With digital twins, VR (virtual reality) headsets could immerse firefighters in true-to-life high-risk scenarios, enabling them to familiarize themselves with hazardous environments in complete safety.” (Google 3D Tiles are based on the 3D Tiles open standard for streaming and rendering geospatial data developed by Cesium, a company acquired by Bentley in 2024.)
For now, the development and testing of DTER are centered on Smart DCU. Program leaders are working with Dublin City University’s estates team as well as Insight and the Centre for Emergency Management faculty, which sits in the university’s business school. “The Smart DCU team has built a high-fidelity digital twin of the university campus in collaboration with university researchers, and now we have the opportunity to show for real how this technology could be applied to better manage the university campus and beyond,” says Cudden, the program liaison at the City Council.
Digital Twin for Emergency Response, also known as DTER, aims to reduce pre-incident planning time for firefighting.Howell spends one day a week at Smart DCU, acting as a vital bridge between the city’s fire service and the technology developers. For the Dublin Fire Brigade, this ensures the digital twin is tailored to their operational needs. For Smart DCU, researchers and their partners at Bentley, it provides direct insight into the practical challenges and requirements of the fire service. While Smart DCU is the current focus of the city’s larger DTER program, the goal is that the practical product being developed at Smart DCU will be rolled out across the city and fire service.
When this Dublin Fire Brigade digital twin is ready, anticipated for 2026, the focus will shift to the challenge of training the brigade’s 1,000-strong workforce to effectively use the digital model. With such a large team, ensuring consistent proficiency will require a well-structured training program and lean into the intuitive aspects of the iTwin Experience user interface. “I know what I want it to do; I know what I want to see,” says Howell. “So, I’m working with Bentley to make the platform as user friendly as possible.”
Once the digital twin is rolled out, it will continue to evolve, becoming a richer, more powerful resource over time. This potential to build something lasting resonates with local officials. Keeley says: “Our workforce is getting younger, and there’s a real hunger for this kind of technology. They recognize how tools like DTER can add long-term value: Every trip out of the station, every site visit, has the potential to generate useful data that enhances the digital twin and strengthens the entire service. That sense of contributing to something bigger is really well-received.”
DTER is more than a leap in technology—it’s a vision for the future of firefighting. From campus trials at Smart DCU to the advanced tools of Bentley’s iTwin, DTER marks a pivotal step toward a safer, smarter and faster emergency response for Dublin. It could also serve as a model for other smart cities. As the project moves closer to implementation, it promises to save critical time and enhance safety for both firefighters and the communities they serve. And Keeley? Let’s just say he’s hitting the nail on the head.
