“With greater knowledge of Castilla-La Mancha and its residents using our AWS solution, we can identify the skills we’ll need for continued sustainable development and ensure people’s skills are fit for the future.”
Juan Angel Morejudo Flores
Chief Information Officer, Castilla-La Mancha Regional Government
The Castilla-La Mancha Regional Government (Castilla-La Mancha), which oversees Spain’s third largest region, wanted to drive economic development for its 2 million-plus residents in an inclusive and sustainable way. To achieve its goal, it built a digital twin of the entire region—which covers roughly 79,000 square kilometers (30,502 square miles)—to predict the outcomes of policies on the economy, tourism, healthcare, wildfires, and other areas.
Working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Partner Esri, Castilla-La Mancha constructed the digital twin running on a cloud-native AWS infrastructure. Using this technology, the region has pinpointed the best locations for solar panels to power a business hub to reduce CO2 emissions and plans to use it as a tool to drive sustainable economic development.
Deploying the First Digital Twin for Regional Government in Spain
Like regional authorities across Spain, Castilla-La Mancha is helping deliver the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and support the Digital Spain Strategy 2026, which aims to provide disruptive change that is inclusive and sustainable. The autonomous community is reducing the environmental impact of its IT by deploying workloads on AWS, whose data centers are more energy efficient than on-premises infrastructures.
For greater sustainability, Castilla-La Mancha has also begun building cloud-native solutions. It’s using technologies, including microservices and containerization, to collate and process data for a digital twin of the region that the government is using for data-informed decision-making. Juan Angel Morejudo Flores, chief information officer for the Castilla-La Mancha Regional Government, says, “We are the first regional government in Spain to exercise the power of this technology to improve services for residents and the effectiveness of our policies.”
Building a Highly Scalable Cloud-Native Platform with AWS
As part of the project, Castilla-La Mancha engaged AWS Partner Esri, whose ArcGIS platform is engaged to create virtual twins of natural and man-made environments. Esri deployed the platform’s key components including the geographic information system on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) optimizing the performance and scalability of the Kubernetes microservices containers. Esri also applied Machine Learning on AWS to build, train, and deploy machine learning models to extract insights for the region.
In the early months of 2023, Castilla-La Mancha used the digital twin to optimize the positioning of solar panels at a hi-tech business hub chosen by the Spanish Government to support the Gaia-X project. European Union (EU)-backed Gaia-X aims to develop a secure data infrastructure across Europe. Based in Talavera de la Reina, the business hub will eventually support 180 public and private entities, and the regional government wanted to maximize its consumption of renewable energy sources to reduce the site’s CO2 footprint. Morejudo Flores states, “Our digital twin on AWS showed us how much solar energy each building would capture so we could deploy solar panels in the best way.”
Making Progress Sustainable for Castilla-La Mancha
The regional government is now using €5 million of new funding from the EU to develop further digital twin use cases. One idea is to get a deeper understanding of the local tourism industry. Castilla-La Mancha will engage the solution to visualize the movements of tourists across the area while classifying them by demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral characteristics. Morejudo Flores says, “With greater insights, we can make better decisions on providing amenities—like parking, signage, bathrooms, and sidewalks—and maximize the return on money spent while minimizing waste.”
In addition, the government can use the platform to learn more about wildfires across its territory. “We can apply machine learning models acting on multiple variables like pollution, air temperature and vegetation type to predict conflagrations and focus our resources on those areas,” Morejudo Flores explains. As someone who was born in the region, he feels passionately about the influence the digital twin can have on the area’s economic development. Morejudo Flores concludes, “With greater knowledge of Castilla-La Mancha and its residents using our AWS solution, we can identify the skills we’ll need for continued sustainable development and ensure people’s skills are fit for the future.”
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