Dynamic Development of Traffic Simulations for Urban Digital Twins

Urban sprawl creates an increasing amount of stress on metropolitan infrastructures. The concept of the Urban Digital Twin (UDT) has been explored as a solution to these challenges by coupling real and virtual environments to integrate real-time data to model and simulate urban areas. However, these twins are difficult to scale and maintain due to their knowledge-intensive development process. Likewise, issues contributing to traffic stress from urban sprawl result in a lack of real-time data sources beyond city centers. This work addresses the challenge of updating a UDT, proposing a framework for automatic and dynamic UDT development pertaining to traffic simulations. We leverage open-source data in the Unity 3D game engine: Cesium and OpenStreetMap platform to create a scalable framework for traffic simulations generated through the Simulation of Urban MObility package. Furthermore, we introduce a proof-of-concept use case by modeling crime response path planning at the University of Central Florida.