A Data-Driven Digital Twin for Urban Activity Monitoring

The increasing pace of sensing and communication technology rollout is paving the way for concrete deployments of smart city applications, enabling a data-driven modeling of processes and the environment. In particular, the Urban Facility Management (UFM) process is growing in importance, recognized to have a direct impact on the sustainability and the development of our cities. In [1] we presented a system's view of a Digital Twin solution for the UFM process. The solution relies on (near)real-time data to quantify the activity index in an area of interest, used as a basis for planning decisions. In this study, we focus on the predictive subsystem, tasked with computing near-to-mid term predictions of the activity index, equipping UFM operators with a flexible decision-support system. Without loss of generality, we present an analysis of the vehicular traffic component, part of the activity index, assessing the accuracy of different predictive schemes, discussing some operational implications.