PhD Thesis Digital Twins for Transportation

The Competence Unit 'Digital Resilient Cities' supports cities and their stakeholders in the cross-sectoral transformation process, combining expertise in climate, energy, mobility, and urban planning.

With the aim of creating climate-neutral, competitive, and sustainable living spaces, we develop and integrate state-of-the-art evidence-based analysis and simulation tools for sustainable transportation, systemic urban transformation, as well as for the concrete planning and management of neighborhood and building solutions.

As part of our mission to develop smart solutions to tackle the climate change, we have launched a PhD programme with TU Munich.

The PhD candidate may work on one of the following specific PhD topics:

• Meta Study on Defining Best Practices: Conduct a comprehensive meta-study to delineate best practices for designing models relevant to urban and traffic planning.
• Integration of models from multiple disciplines: Using the digital twin of a city as a standard model, traffic models and other transport related data sets may be linked to urban models.
• Enable informed and fact-based participation: Explore stakeholder decision-making processes which include results from the evaluation of scenarios.
• Interrelations between urban and transport planning: Analyse effects of transportation trends (e.g., parking restrictions, autonomous vehicles) on urban design and planning.
• Test Junction Experimentation: Standardise experimental studies and test them on a test junction.
• Connection to City Intelligence Lab: Collaborate with our City Intelligence Lab to leverage resources, expertise, and infrastructure for advancing research in digital twins for transportation.

The PhD position will employ various methods to achieve its objectives, including:

• Simulation and calibration: Utilise diverse datasets for the calibration of multiple models, such as pedestrian simulation or SUMO (Simulation of Urban Mobility).
• Model Integration: Integrate calibrated models to create a comprehensive digital twin framework for transportation planning.
• Participation studies: Employ an iterative approach for integrated transport and urban planning, incorporating feedback from stakeholders and experimental results to refine and improve acceptance of planning results.