A Geospatial Platform to Manage Large-Scale Individual Mobility for an Urban Digital Twin Platform

Ahyun Lee,Sung-Woong Shin,Kyong-Ho Kim,Kang-Woo Lee

doi:10.3390/rs14030723

Ahyun Lee, Sung-Woong Shin + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14030723

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Abstract

Urban digital twin (UDT) technology can be used to digitize physical urban spaces. Previous UDT or smart city research reconstructed the three-dimensional topography of urban spaces, buildings, and facilities. They collected various multimodal sensor data from cities and monitored conditions such as temperature, humidity, fine dust, and real-time road traffic. However, these studies lacked ways to manage individual mobility data, such as those of the vehicles and pedestrians, which constitute major components of a city. Here, we propose a geospatial platform based on the universal game engine Unity3D, which manages large-scale individual mobility data for a UDT platform. The proposed platform stores and manages individual vehicles or pedestrians using information from public closed-circuit television. It also allows the generation of long-term route information for a unique vehicle based on its license plate. We also propose methods to anonymize license plates, to ensure the security of individuals, and to compress individual mobility data. Unique UDT models with individual mobility functionalities can be built and visualized using our proposed geospatial platform.

Highlights

In the way that humans developed civilizations by storing knowledge as letters, the digitization of the physical “real” world that people can see and touch could be one possible step
The urban digital twin (UDT) platform we propose aims to support and provide data that are equal to the number of actual vehicles present in a space, without representing it as a single circle only
We propose a Urban digital twin (UDT) platform that can achieve this for object models of vehicles and pedestrians; these are dynamic data based on large-scale sensing of individual mobility

Summary

Introduction

In the way that humans developed civilizations by storing knowledge as letters, the digitization of the physical “real” world that people can see and touch could be one possible step. What kind of world could be created if physical realities, as perceived with the five senses, could become digital data that could be updated to resemble reality? In which the updated digital data are known as a digital twin, is not common [1,2]. Digital twins were created using sensors attached to complex machines or parts, and used to manage replacement cycles or failure; they are used in smart factories [3,4,5]. In the complex process of assembling a car, the only moving element is a robot—there are no humans involved—and information on the components of the car are managed digitally.

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