Gitakrishnan Ramadurai, Faculty Lead – Mobility and Intelligent Transport Collaborative, IIT Madras and Satheesh G, Scientist-G and Group Head ITNS, C-DAC, Trivandrum delivered the keynote address on the final day of the TrafficInfratech Expo at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi. Digital trends in mobility and technology development to enable a sustainable, safe and efficient mobility ecosystem for India through intelligent, data driven and interoperable transportation technologies were the topics in focus.
Digital twin is a virtual representation of an object or a system, opened Gitakrishnan and it spans the life cycle, so in that sense it is a twin. The key component in digital twins has to be real time data – not static or a snapshot. This is also different from simulation which can be a component of the digital twin but not the twin itself. Eventually it has to help in decision making. Another key aspect of digital twin is a two-way flow of information – from the field to analyse a digital twin by running simulations and decision-making questions and then communicating back to the real world. Only when that happens are digital twins going to be beneficial, he said.
Digital twin is richer than simulation, he continued. Simulation models are mainly for a particular application in a particular geographic scope, whereas the digital twin has to be much larger. It is not a single entity but a combination of several twins as it is all a question of fidelity and scale. An OEM for a car is constantly monitoring the car with a digital twin. A car is just one vehicle in the entire traffic flow on your roads, networks and parking lots. There will be a digital twin for parking lot, a corridor, a trend for every vehicle on the network and an overall digital twin bringing all of these together.
How they will all interact and plug-in will require standards, he said. While simulation is very focused on a particular process and outcome, a digital twin can have multiple simulations and multiple digital twins as well, that being a key differentiator. India has 100 smart cities and the PM Gati Shakti program is powering building highways, freight corridors and bullet trains. If a fraction of the investments was used to develop the digital twin, the full potential of these projects could be realised. With millions of terabytes of data being generated and multiple metro and public transit projects on the anvil, EVs becoming mainstream, air quality and parking continuing to be a problem, it would be the right time to take up digital twin projects, he opined.
Citing Singapore and Helsinki as cities that have adopted digital twin technology, he said they were yet to use data real-time and this is where India could take the lead. Challenges exist, of course. Digital twins for multimodal networks need to integrate data from multiple sources, all of which needs to be thought through, he said. IIT Madras is in the process of signing MOU partnerships with cities, government ministries and service providers in multiple projects on last mile connectivity and public transit networks. Digital twins cannot exist in vacuum, there has to be some visible benefit else people will not invest in it, he concluded.
Satheesh G said in his keynote address that the mission for sustainable, safe and efficient mobility ecosystem was initiated under the ITS R&D program of MeitY which envisaged that mobility should be a self-reliant, adaptable, interoperable solution which should be affordable for deployment. These solutions would fall under the nation’s goals of Atmanirbhar Bharat, Digital India and other government initiatives. Under ITMS, C-DAC has developed an ATMS which includes the traffic controller and the adaptive traffic management software, the vehicle priority system, pedestrian enhancement controller and traveler information system which is a mobile app, he said.
On the road safety side, C-DAC has developed three products, the Intelligent Red Light Violation Identification System (IRIDS), On-Board Driver Assistance and Warning System (ODAWS) and desktop-based Driving Simulator for Non-Lane Based Mixed Traffic System. Other developments include thermal smart sensors, thermal smart cameras, CMOS smart camera and a millimeter wave radar module which had IMU sensors and GPS which could give positional as well as vehicle data. This data would be used to model driver behaviour, he said. The hardware in the thermal camera has the power to run the analytics in the camera itself, the output being directly generated through an Ethernet port.
Satheesh G presented various other indigenous solutions developed by C-DAC in the mobility space, including in public transit and fleet management. The technologies have been given to different partners for deployment, he said. New R&D projects from C-DAC include the CV2X ready smart Universal Traffic Controller, network level AI ML based ATMS using multimodal data and camera-based solutions for providing safer highways by predicting accident prone areas due to weather conditions or geometry of the roads. LiDAR and Radar technology developments are being initiated by MeitY and efforts are being made towards indigenous development of a radar chip which has an RF antenna and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) core. Industry participation was a must for meeting technical and financial requirements, he concluded.
