Open-source tool aims to make digital transit maps cheaper and faster to build
Researchers in Stockholm have created a template for building digital twins of public transport systems using free software and open data, significantly cutting development time and cost. The breakthrough could help cities worldwide upgrade aging transit infrastructure monitoring without massive upfront investment.
Originaltitel: Open source Digital Twin development pipeline for Public Transport: A case study in Stockholm
<p>Digital Twins (DTs) offer a wide range of functionalities including retrospective analyses of past conditions, real-time monitoring and control, as well as the evaluation of future scenarios. These capabilities make DTs a valuable tool in the Public Transport (PT) domain. To enable the functionalities demanded by traffic planners and operators, DTs rely on the integration of aggregated and disaggregated data from real-world sources and simulations. Informative visualizations of these data sources within the street network, combined with 3D representations of the built environment, provide the necessary contextualization to facilitate decision-making. However, since DTs integrate this large set of different components, their development is typically time- and resource-intensive which represents a barrier for their adoption. To make DTs more widely accessible and promote their use in the PT field, we propose and implement a DT development pipeline that integrates real-world data collection and processing, simulation, and 3D visualization in a unified framework. The pipeline is based on open data and open source software to enable the implementation of PT DTs with low barriers while allowing for extensibility to other urban-related applications. We demonstrate the DT’s functionalities with a prototypical implementation for the region of Kista in Stockholm, and discuss the potential as well as the limitations of PT DTs for practical use cases from a conceptual perspective.</p>