The Architecture of an Intelligent Digital Twin for a Cyber-Physical Route-Finding System in Smart Cities

Within an intelligent automated cyber-physical system, the realization of the autonomous mechanism for data collection, data integration, and data analysis plays a critical role in the design, development, operation, and maintenance of such a system. This construct is particularly vital for fault-tolerant route-finding systems that rely on the imprecise GPS location of the vehicles to properly operate, timely plan, and continuously produce informative feedback to the user. More essentially, the integration of digital twins with cyber-physical route-finding systems has been overlooked in intelligent transportation services with the capacity to construct the network routes solely from the locations of the operating vehicles. To address this limitation, the present study proposes a conceptual architecture that employs digital twin to autonomously maintain, update, and manage intelligent transportation systems. This virtual management simulation can improve the accuracy of time-of-arrival prediction based on auto-generated routes on which the vehicle's real-time location is mapped. To that end, first, an intelligent transportation system was developed based on two primary mechanisms: 1) an automated route finding process in which predictive data-driven models (i.e., regularized least-squares regression) can elicit the geometry and direction of the routes of the transportation network from the cloud of geotagged data points of the operating vehicles and 2) an intelligent mapping process capable of accurately locating the vehicles on the map whereby their arrival times to any point on the route can be estimated. Afterward, the digital representations of the physical entities (i.e., vehicles and routes) were simulated based on the auto-generated routes and the vehicles' locations in near-real-time. Finally, the feasibility and usability of the presented conceptual framework were evaluated through the comparison between the primary characteristics of the physical entities with their digital representations. The proposed architecture can be used by the vehicle-tracking applications dependent on geotagged data for digital mapping and location tracking of vehicles under a systematic comparison and simulation cyber-physical system.