Multi-Pedestrian Safety Warning at Urban Intersections Use Case of Digital Twin

2026-05-12

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic safety warning mechanisms for multiple pedestrians at urban intersections by proposing a tightly coupled physical-digital twin framework. The framework integrates camera and ultra-wideband (UWB) sensing, edge-cloud collaborative computing, trajectory prediction models, and MQTT-based communication to establish a scalable, modular, and general-purpose digital twin architecture. It achieves real-time multi-pedestrian safety warnings on a city-scale wireless testbed for the first time and validates system performance through joint virtual reality simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the system enables high-precision localization and hazard alerts, delivers low-latency end-to-end responsiveness, and significantly reduces users’ reaction time to safety warnings.

Abstract

Digital twins (DTs) for urban transportation systems have gained increasing attention; however, their systematic evaluation in safety-critical scenarios remains limited. This paper presents a multi-pedestrian safety warning system at urban intersections enabled by a tightly coupled physical-digital twin framework. Built upon the COSMOS city-scale wireless testbed in New York City, the proposed system integrates camera and ultra-wideband (UWB), edge-cloud computing, predictive trajectory modeling, and MQTT-based communication to deliver real-time safety alerts to vulnerable road users (VRUs). The system is evaluated through both field deployment and virtual reality (VR) experiments. Results demonstrate high warning generation accuracy, localization accuracy, efficient end-to-end latency under different model configurations, and significant reductions in user response time when warnings are issued. The proposed DT framework provides a scalable, modular, and generalizable solution for real-time multi-pedestrian safety enhancement at complex urban intersections.

Problem

• multi-pedestrian safety
• urban intersections
• safety warning
• vulnerable road users
• digital twin

Innovation

• Digital Twin
• Multi-pedestrian Safety
• Ultra-Wideband (UWB)
• Predictive Trajectory Modeling
• Edge-Cloud Computing