Enabling and supporting car-as-a-service by digital twin modeling and deployment

Smart City is one area of application for the Internet of Things (IoT) and it has been attracting attention from both academia and industry. Cities will be composed by autonomous parts that communicate and provide services to each other. For instance, cars (autonomous or not) may be seen as a service that transports people from one point to another. Interactions between users and these kinds of services will grow, making it necessary to have digitization of all these parts of the Smart City. The Digital Twin (DT) concept proposes that real-world assets have a virtual representation connecting the physical world with the cyber world. This allows to track the whole life-cycle of this object as well as perform simulations with current or previously stored data. In this context, this work proposes the use of Digital Twin for enabling and supporting car-as-a-service (CaaS). A case study has been developed to demonstrate the modeling and the deployment of the Digital Twin, highlighting how this concept can be one of the key enablers for CaaS.