Digital Twins in Intelligent Transport Systems: A Systematic Review of Resilience Mechanisms and Smart City Implications

The intensification of urbanization, the growth in mobility demand and the multiplication of disruptions expose intelligent transport systems to new operational vulnerabilities, making resilience a central issue for the management of transport networks. By conducting a systematic literature review, in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 and PRISMA-S recommendations, this article examines the extent to which, through which functions, under which conditions, and with what level of evidence digital twins can support the resilience of intelligent transport systems. The literature search covered the 2020–2025 period across Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and TRID and was complemented by backward and forward citation chaining, targeting research and review articles dealing with digital twins in transport, mobility, transport infrastructures, or ITS, as well as their links with resilience mechanisms. After screening and eligibility assessment, 61 studies were included in the final analytical corpus. The results show that digital twins are no longer limited to a simple virtual representation of the physical system but are increasingly established as service-oriented cyber–physical layers capable of supporting functions that may contribute to resilience, including real-time visibility, disruption anticipation, scenario simulation, dynamic optimization, decision support, service continuity, and post-disruption learning. The study also highlights several persistent limitations, notably conceptual instability, the sectoral concentration of studies, the lack of large-scale empirical validation, and the insufficient consideration of organizational, human, and governance dimensions. It concludes that digital twins should not be interpreted as automatically enhancing the resilience of ITS, but rather as having the potential to support resilience when they are associated with reliable data, interoperability, synchronization, model reliability, and the ability of stakeholders to transform digital intelligence into coordinated operational responses.