Digital Twin Simulation of Connected and Automated Vehicles with the Unity Game Engine

A Digital Twin is defined as a digital replica of a real entity in the physical world. In this study, the Digital Twin simulation is developed for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) by leveraging the Unity game engine. A Digital Twin simulation architecture is proposed, which contains the physical world and the digital world. Particularly, the digital world consists of three layers, where the Unity game objects are built to simulate the “hardware”, the Unity scripting API are used to simulate the “software”, and external tools (e.g., SUMO, MATLAB, python, and/or AWS) are leveraged to enhance the simulation functionalities. A case study of personazlied adaptive cruise control (P-ACC) is conducted to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed Digital Twin simulation, where the ACC system can be designed to satisfy each driver's preference with the help of cloud computing.