A Digital Smart City for Emerging Mobility Systems
This provides a digital tool for researchers and developers in smart city and mobility systems to test algorithms more efficiently, though it is incremental as it builds on existing simulation technologies.
The paper tackles the need for testing environments for emerging mobility systems by introducing a Unity-based virtual simulation environment called IDS 3D City, which enables faster iterative design of experiments compared to physical testbeds and validates control algorithms before implementation.
The increasing demand for emerging mobility systems with connected and automated vehicles has imposed the necessity for quality testing environments to support their development. In this paper, we introduce a Unity-based virtual simulation environment for emerging mobility systems, called the Information and Decision Science Lab's Scaled Smart Digital City (IDS 3D City), intended to operate alongside its physical peer and its established control framework. By utilizing the Robot Operation System, AirSim, and Unity, we constructed a simulation environment capable of iteratively designing experiments significantly faster than it is possible in a physical testbed. This environment provides an intermediate step to validate the effectiveness of our control algorithms prior to their implementation in the physical testbed. The IDS 3D City also enables us to demonstrate that our control algorithms work independently of the underlying vehicle dynamics, as the vehicle dynamics introduced by AirSim operate at a different scale than our scaled smart city. Finally, we demonstrate the behavior of our digital environment by performing an experiment in both the virtual and physical environments and comparing their outputs.