Supervised with the assistance of Gary White.
A digital twin is a highly accurate digital representation of a physical process, person, place, system or device. Digital twins were originally designed to improve manufacturing processes using simulations that have highly accurate models of individual components. However, with increasingly scalable and accurate BIM model creation capabilities, it is now possible to create digital twin cities. Together with increased IoT data from sensors deployed in the city, this supports a range of possibilities in urban planning, traffic simulation and increased public consultation [1]. A 3D model of the digital twin city can be walked around easily by the public to view the effects of changes in urban planning or new traffic management policies [2]. This allows for greater transparency and evaluation before putting these decisions into practice.
Complex systems such as Smart Cities are difficult to visualize and understand thoroughly and a digital twin can provide valuable insights and information into their workings. An example of a work-in-progress digital twin of a city is Virtual Singapore [3]. In this project we will use a digital twin of the docklands area in Dublin and show how this can be used to create a highly accurate simulation environment for traffic and pedestrian movement.
This project will simulate the occurrence of rare events such as a fire evacuation, or flooding event in the 3Arena. Pedestrian movement models can be used to simulate a number of different categories of pedestrians such as older people, toddlers and adults [4]. These highly realistic simulations can be used to answer a number of interesting questions in a smart space, such as where is the optimal placement of fire evacuation points for the 3Arena, or where to place sandbags in anticipation of a flood event, or related to other safety considerations. The project can use the pedestrian model developed in the 3Arena experiment for a larger city scale simulation.
[1] N. Mohammadi and J. E. Taylor, “Smart city digital twins,” in 2017 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI). IEEE, 2017, pp. 1–5
[2] A. El Saddik, “Digital twins: the convergence of multimedia technolo-gies,”IEEE MultiMedia, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 87–92, 2018.
[3] https://www.nrf.gov.sg/programmes/virtual-singapore [4] A. Oxley, E. Ihsen, B. N. Fildes, J. L. Charlton, and R. H. Day, “Crossing roads safely: An experimental study of age differences in gap selection by pedestrians,”Accident Analysis andPrevention, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 962 – 971, 2005. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457505000795