Leveraging Digital Twin Technologies for Public Space Protection and Vulnerability Assessment
This addresses security vulnerabilities in public spaces (e.g., metro stations, squares) for urban planners and security agencies, though it appears incremental as it integrates existing technologies into a new framework.
The paper tackles the challenge of protecting public spaces (soft-targets) from complex security threats by introducing a Digital Twin-as-a-Security-Service (DTaaSS) architecture, which combines Digital Twin technology with IoT, cloud computing, Big Data analytics, and AI to enable real-time monitoring, threat detection, incident prediction, and vulnerability assessment, demonstrating applicability in scenarios like metro stations and leisure sites.
Over the recent years, the protection of the so-called `soft-targets', i.e. locations easily accessible by the general public with relatively low, though, security measures, has emerged as a rather challenging and increasingly important issue. The complexity and seriousness of this security threat growths nowadays exponentially, due to the emergence of new advanced technologies (e.g. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), 3D printing, etc.); especially when it comes to large-scale, popular and diverse public spaces. In this paper, a novel Digital Twin-as-a-Security-Service (DTaaSS) architecture is introduced for holistically and significantly enhancing the protection of public spaces (e.g. metro stations, leisure sites, urban squares, etc.). The proposed framework combines a Digital Twin (DT) conceptualization with additional cutting-edge technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, Big Data analytics and AI. In particular, DTaaSS comprises a holistic, real-time, large-scale, comprehensive and data-driven security solution for the efficient/robust protection of public spaces, supporting: a) data collection and analytics, b) area monitoring/control and proactive threat detection, c) incident/attack prediction, and d) quantitative and data-driven vulnerability assessment. Overall, the designed architecture exhibits increased potential in handling complex, hybrid and combined threats over large, critical and popular soft-targets. The applicability and robustness of DTaaSS is discussed in detail against representative and diverse real-world application scenarios, including complex attacks to: a) a metro station, b) a leisure site, and c) a cathedral square.