Digital twins of people, cities, and crises: how do scientists simulate the future

Andrei Borodin, General Director of "Digital Roads" ("Urbantech" group of companies), told how digital twins saved NASA's legendary Apollo 13 space mission in 1970 and how these technologies are used today

In 2021, "Urbantech" company announced its hardware and software complex designed to create digital twins and monitor the condition of road infrastructure objects. The system called "Autodiscovery" has been designed as part of "Digital Roads" project. "Autodiscovery" carries out the complete documenting, base mapping, creates passports of road infrastructure objects, including all history and relevant data for the development and updating of Regulations for organization of road traffic.

Mobile laboratories of the complex conduct automated digitization of road infrastructure objects as they drive through the city to collect reliable information — with precise measurement of coordinates and parameters of the objects, as well as panoramic photos. Machine vision, neural network analysis and lidar technologies are implemented in the complex, enabling the system to determine and classify road objects (traffic lights, signs, roadbed) and their current condition with a 10 cm positioning accuracy, in online mode.

Digital twins are a powerful tool able to predict the development of cities, the impact of financial crises on various countries, foretell road and air accidents. In 2020, the digital twin market was valued at $3.1 billion, and some analysts predict that it can reach about $48.2 billion by 2026.