Modeling and Implementation of Digital Twins for the Analysis of Transportation Systems

Transport engineers, authorities, companies, stakeholders, and all experts involved on transportation planning work every day to improve the trip experience of people, and to reduce the impacts on the collectivity. Traffic congestion, pollution and energy consumption are core problems for the transportation system. On the one hand a congested road causes an exponential increase in the energy consumption and waiting times, while a not-congested road can be more attractive and slowly become congested over time; on the other hand, the environmental capacity of road links is not perceived, thus generating high emission and distribution of pollutants. In fact, the ability of transportation planners is to avoid traffic congestion but offer at the same time pleasant, accessible and sustainable trips. This may include several planning techniques which may involve traffic calming and limitations, lane reservation, changing in the road network and geometry, as well as apply new technologies, services and means of transportation. It is worth noting that trying these features directly on a city can be very expensive and produce irreparable damages to the transportation system; also, traditional transport models are not able to adeguately simulate most of these features. Recently, it has been recently introduced the digital twin, a digital reproduction of a city to be used as a test platform for ’what if’ scenarios. In fact, transport digital twin is not just a digital reproduction of the transportation system, but consider reaction of humans to the changes applied to the system, in order to make a comparison between different scenarios. The present document studies large-scale digital twins, which are able to consider the spatial propagation of effects, and particularly focuses on advanced and time-dependent models able to simulate the door-to-door trip experience of all users and adequately model the transport features of the future.