CPS: Medium: Hybrid Twins for Urban Transportation: From Intersections to Citywide Management

This Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) grant will focus on the development of an urban traffic management system, which is driven by public needs for improved safety, mobility, and reliability within metropolitan areas. Future cities will be radically transformed by the Internet of Things (IoT), which will provide ubiquitous connectivity between physical infrastructure, mobile assets, humans, and control systems.

In particular, IoT and smart traffic management have the potential to significantly improve increasingly faltering transportation systems that account for over 25% of greenhouse gas emissions and over one trillion dollars of annual economic and social loss. The project develops a hybrid twin that operates in parallel with the real world at real-time resolution, leveraging machine learning and edge computing, to monitor surrounding traffic, send safety warnings to connected vulnerable users, and provide learning-based controls to traffic lights and automated vehicles.

As such, the broader impacts include advancing the understanding of urban traffic modeling, computation, and simulation, and enriching transportation science with data science. The accompanying educational plan aims to broaden participation in computing and engineering by underrepresented minorities and women via outreach programs, including programs for Harlem public school teachers and K-12 students, as well as new graduate course development.

The project’s goal is to develop a hierarchical and distributed hybrid twin to support urban traffic management systems while leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), edge cloud computing, and next generation communication networks. A hybrid twin consists of a virtual (i.e., existing traffic simulation) and a digital twin, which integrate physics-based models and assimilate data acquired from infrastructure and in-vehicle sensors for traffic modeling, prediction, and management.

The foundational research contributions are data analytics and machine learning including real-time learning for control. The traffic management system will be validated and evaluated via computer simulation and experimentation in the NSF PAWR COSMOS city-scale wireless testbed that is being deployed in West Harlem next to the Columbia campus. This unique urban testbed will provide a realistic environment for the system design and evaluation process, and will also serve as a platform for local community outreach.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.