In geospatial field, CityGML is widely used as exchange and storage format especially for the urban planning. 3D city models are currently being used in dozens of application domains for diverse purposes. Targeted application domains explicitly include urban and landscape planning, architectural design, environmental simulations, mobile telecommunications, disaster management, homeland security, vehicle and pedestrian navigation, training simulators, and mobile robotics.
Some of the advantages of using 3D city models in these domains are as follows:
3D city model delivers a true picture and real scene of the ground and enable the planners to view the locations of services and real places in an intuitive and user-friendly way.
3D city models provide and reuse multi-scale data in different applications while providing data consistency. This is supported by multi-representation data models like LOD concept of CityGML.
With 3D city model, we can view the object from different perspectives.
3D geometry feature is useful to model shadows on the features.
The appearance and textural information provides for more realistic visualizations.
Urban solar potential estimation utilizing CityGML models.
Simulation of traffic noise level mapped on building walls from the urban road segments.
CityGML based 3D data models inter-operability.
3D indoor logistics and subsurface utilities.
However, there are also some negative consequences associated with the use of 3D data models such as high cost of production, the inaccurate models according to the real surroundings, enormous amount of time for manual work for data creation, and problems of data validation.