Using vehicle telematics data within a digital twin of urban transport systems; a case study in the West Midlands, UK

While road transport is a cornerstone of modern civilization bringing profound positive impacts to the economy and human well-being, it is also associated with several undesirable and unsustainable outcomes including urban air pollution, climate change, noise and congestion. Hence, sustainable road transport has been given significant attention in the past two decades. Digital twins of urban transport are promising digital assets to evaluate and improve the sustainability level of the transport systems.  Digital twins provides a testbed whereby the impacts of the current and future policies and strategies can be modelled and analysed in a digital environment, helping ensure that tax money spent delivers the expected results. However, the desperate shortage of spatiotemporal road data is the major challenge in establishing data flow between the digital and physical twins of road transport. Vehicle telematics data, typically collected from GPS-connected, can provide an excellent source of intormation with which to address the spatial and temporal aspects of transport data. This presentation will highlight how telematics data can be used within road transport digital twins.

In this study, we develop digital twins of road transport for Tyseley Environmental Enterprise District (TEED) a small area of east Birmingham, UK, using the newly-developed approach of GeoSpatial and Temporal Mapping of Urban Mobility (GeoSTMUM). GeoSTMUM uses vehicle telematics (location and time) data to estimate several road transport characteristics such as the average speed of traffic flow, travel time, etc., with high spatial and temporal resolutions of 15m and 2h, respectively. It also allows for evaluation of the average vehicle dynamic status as the speed-time-acceleration profile of the roads. Vehicle telematics data for this study were collected for the years 2016 and 2018 through the WM-AIR projct (www.wm-air.org.uk). We then use real-world fleet composition and exhaustive emission measurements to translate the vehicle dynamics status into the real-urban fuel consumption and CO₂ and NO_x emission factors. Results highlight the importance on fleet renovation, in terms of vehicle propulsion systems (EURO class, fuel type, etc.) upon real-urban emissions and fuel consumption. The presentation will end with example future use cases of telematics data within digital twins.