Digital Twin Simulation of Connected and Automated Vehicles with the
Unity Game Engine
Abstract
A Digital Twin is defined as a digital replica of a real entity in the
physical world. In this study, the Digital Twin simulation is developed
for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) by leveraging the Unity game
engine. A Digital Twin simulation architecture is proposed, which
contains the physical world and the digital world. Particularly, the
digital world consists of three layers, where the Unity game objects are
built to simulate the “hardware”, the Unity scripting API are used to
simulate the “software”, and external tools (e.g., SUMO, MATLAB,
python, and/or AWS) are leveraged to enhance the simulation
functionalities. A case study of personazlied adaptive cruise control
(P-ACC) is conducted to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed
Digital Twin simulation, where the ACC system can be designed to satisfy
each driver’s preference with the help of cloud computing.