A Digital Smart City for Emerging Mobility Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a Unity-based virtual simulation environment for emerging mobility systems, enabling faster experiment design, validation of control algorithms, and comparison with physical testbeds in smart city contexts.

Contribution

Introduces the IDS 3D City, a scalable virtual simulation platform for testing emerging mobility systems alongside physical environments.

Findings

Simulation environment accelerates experiment design.

Control algorithms validated virtually before physical deployment.

Virtual and physical outputs show comparable behaviors.

Abstract

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.