Building digital twins of existing highways using map data based on engineering expertise

F. Jiang, L. Ma, T. Broyd, W. Chen, H. Luo

Abstract

Highway asset management requires capturing the highway's status. However, the onsite survey of the highway is very costly and time-consuming. This paper presents a novel approach for creating the digital twin of a highway using map data. The digital twin consists of primary highway components, including horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, cross-section, lanes and central reserves. It follows the engineering representation of a highway, which has excellent potential for further application in the field. The proposed approach was tested in a section of the A1(M) motorway in the UK. It requires minimum human input and has very high accuracy. Despite many outliers in the collected map data, the average vertical deviation per square metre between the surface of the generated digital twin and the actual data was at the centimetre level.

Keywords: Digital twin, Highway engineering, Alignment fitting, Cross-section, Map, Point clouds, Arial photograph

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092658052100532X?via=ihub