Singapore is a city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It is located one degree of latitude north of the Equator off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula and covers an area of about 728 km2. It currently has a population of about 5.7 million with a population density of about 7810 per km2. Singapore’s high population density leads to its urban development to become more spatially efficient and convenient to improve the quality of life of the residents. This creates a demand for using advanced technology to improve urban planning and design.

In Singapore, the approach to the use of AI in urban planning and design is fivefold: transport, home and environment, business productivity, health and enabled aging, and public-sector services (Kong and Woods, 2018). In the city-state’s urban planning, particularly in the transportation domain, the use of AI is currently explored in areas such as the study of mobility patterns, traffic flows, devising active learning and sensing algorithms, developing decision models for real-time data, and enhanced automated systems for safety (Varakantham et al., 2017). The development of Virtual Singapore, a semantic 3D-model that virtually replicates Singapore and inputs real-time data including on demographics, climate, and traffic, signals the country’s vision for an AI-enabled future (Liceras, 2019).