Paper Title
Feasibility Study of Application of Digital Twins for Collaborative, Smart and Sustainable Urban Road Management

Abstract
Rapid urbanisation in India is creating complex problems in managing urban roads resulting in traffic congestion which leads to wastage of time, higher cost, poor travel quality and safety. As part of this research a physical survey was conducted in the city of Bangalore through visual observations, interviews, and questionnaire surveys with 52 diverse road users to understand the road users’ problems. The survey result shows that the current urban and road traffic management system lacks the capacity to understand and solve the road management problems like congestion, road accidents, social crimes, traffic control and diversion, new construction, and road maintenance works. The survey results also highlight lack of coordination between multiple urban departments, governing bodies and road users and leading to poor decision making. This paper studies the feasibility of applying digital twins along with other available digital technologies like, VANETs, Urban sensing and image processing, Big Data, Artificial intelligence to develop a digital solution for urban road management. The emerging dynamic digital twins have the capability to model and build real-time connectivity between the physical road and virtual objects. Digital twins combined with other digital data and sensing technologies can be utilised for modelling, simulation, monitoring and control of urban road management. Digital twins powered by artificial intelligence can provide real-time solution for safer, faster and high-quality road travel, coordinated road construction and maintenance and collaborative governance resulting in a sustainable urban road management system. Keywords - Urban Road, congestion, Digital twins, road management, VANETs, Urban Sensing, image processing, Big Data, Artificial intelligence.