Digital Twin Research
About
We are developing a city-wide digital twin that mirrors traffic, mobility, and infrastructure conditions. This lets us run fast “what-if” experiments to predict congestion, evaluate interventions, and support planning and operations in both urban and rural networks.
Projects
A 1/10th Scale CDA Vehicle Platform for Cooperative Perception and Digital Twin Based Evaluation
This work presents a comprehensive 1/10th-scale CDA platform for studying cooperative perception, safety, and connected vehicle behavior under realistic urban occlusion conditions. The small testbed includes a fully assembled scaled vehicle equipped with LiDAR, cameras, encoders, and Jetson onboard computer, along with a modular mini-city track where building placement creates realistic blind spot regions. Infrastructure mounted cameras are positioned around the track to observe areas outside the vehicle’s onboard field of view and provide cooperative perception information.
A city-scale traffic simulation model of Chattanooga, Tennessee
This project develops a comprehensive, city-wide traffic simulation for Chattanooga that represents the full street network and its key operating components—including road segments, intersections, and traffic signals—so that system behavior can be studied as an integrated whole rather than in isolated locations. This model serves as a practical planning and operations tool to evaluate “what-if” scenarios, compare potential infrastructure or signal improvements, anticipate the traffic impacts of major events or construction, and support data-informed decisions that improve mobility, safety, and reliability across the city.
Chattanooga Frazier Avenue Digital Twin for Road-Diet Scenario Evaluation
This project develops a high-fidelity “digital twin” of Chattanooga’s Frazier Avenue corridor to help decision-makers evaluate complete-streets and road-diet concepts before construction, using a realistic, data-informed simulation of how vehicles move through the corridor. The model enables side-by-side comparison of “before” and “after” street designs and reports clear, corridor-wide performance measures—such as congestion, queues, travel time, and operating speeds—so agencies can quantify tradeoffs between safety-oriented design changes and traffic operations, and communicate expected impacts to stakeholders with evidence rather than speculation.