Towards Next Generation of Pedestrian and Connected Vehicle In-the-Loop Research: A Digital Twin Co-Simulation Framework

Digital Twin is an emerging technology that replicates real-world entities into a digital space. It has attracted increasing attention in the transportation field and many researchers are exploring its future applications in the development of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) technologies. Connected vehicles (CVs) and pedestrians are among the major traffic participants in ITS. However, the usage of Digital Twin in research involving both CV and pedestrian remains largely unexplored. In this study, a Digital Twin framework for CV and pedestrian in-the-loop simulation is proposed. The proposed framework consists of the physical world, the digital world, and data transmission in between. The features for the entities (CV and pedestrian) that need digital twining are divided into external state and internal state, and the attributes in each state are described. We also demonstrate a sample architecture under the proposed Digital Twin framework, which is based on Carla-Sumo Co-simulation and Cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE). A case study that investigates Vehicle-Pedestrian (V2P) warning system is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the presented architecture. The proposed framework is expected to provide guidance to the future Digital Twin research, and the architecture we build can serve as the testbed for further research and development of ITS applications on CV and pedestrians.