Development of 3D UDTs for Traffic Monitoring in Unreal 5 Game Engine

Abstract

Digital Twins recently, are a much regarded research topic in geospatial engineering, offering great potential for optimization of a variety of interrelated processes in urban environments. A major component of a Digital Twin use case is real-time sensor data input and analysis, which is used as foundation for simulations that lead to decision-support for authorities or even automatic response into the physical environment. The use of game engines as platform for urban Digital Twin use cases is promising due to superior visualization and animation capabilities, that facilitate diverse monitoring use cases for highly dynamic sensor data inputs. This contribution evaluates the fit for purpose of the Unreal Engine 5 game engine for digital twin use cases, by conducting a case study on urban traffic monitoring in the city of Liverpool Australia. The case study proved, that the necessary connections of static data provided via a geodatabase and dynamic real-time data from public portals can be integrated into the engine to establish an interactive Digital Twin use cases for evaluating traffic user interactions.