
Cities Want 'Digital Twins' to Manage Traffic - pseudolus
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/07/digital-twin-mobility-data-standard-city-real-time-traffic/593914/
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jawns
"Digital twin" is a bizarre term for this. They're talking about modeling
traffic flow based on real-time traffic data.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Realtime modeling that includes realtime data is starting to be called digital
twinning in various industries. E.g. each car off a line has its specific
torques of each bolt traveling along with it as a digital twin.

Power plants with sensors on all the equipment trying to predict preventive
maintenance is being called digital twinning too.

~~~
edubs25
Is this only applied to 'real time' modelling or is 'near real time' also
included?

Curious because I used to write software for IIOT predictive analysis (3 years
ago?) and I never heard the term 'digital twin.' Curious if it applies to NRT
or if this is a different beast.

~~~
statictype
Digital Twin is essentially a buzzword like Cloud. It can mean whatever you
want it to, I’m afraid

~~~
astrange
I think I've figured out the IBM-style buzzwords like "mobile productivity
cloud", and I'm making good progress on all the ones in SJC airport ads, but
the one that's still got me is "digital transformation". Shows up all the time
in my promoted tweets.

Didn't everyone digitally transform in like the 90s?

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OliverJones
The CEO of Ford Motor Company, Jim Hackett, has claimed this: for autonomous
vehicles to work resiliently at scale they require

1\. vehicle-centered sensors

2\. a way for vehicles to share their sensors with nearby vehicles,

3\. detailed models of the cities in which they operate, and

4\. wireless networks capable of transporting all this data to where it's
needed.

He calls all this the "mobility operating system."

In the interview I heard (I wish I could remember where, sorry) Mr. Hackett
said he believes the defensible intellectual property for autonomous cars will
be those detailed city models.

So, I am delighted to hear that municipalities are getting ahead of this issue
with respect to city models.

~~~
mc32
Isn’t an issue with no. 2 that bad actors could spoof or inject bad data and
cause problems for cars reading this data in good faith. You can discard one
abnormal data point but not if it’s coordinated.

~~~
syn0byte
Do you worry about some random asshole kid hurling a re-bar in to rush hour
traffic? REing automotive tech, setting up transmitters, and spoofing traffic
data to throw a virtual re-bar in to rush hour traffic could become a pandemic
unless we figure out a way to fight such attacks.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
The difference between these two scenarios is that the asshole kid throwing
rebar is easily detectable and to do it has to be at the location of the
crime.

The asshole spoofing traffic data, depending on how the transmitters are set
up could potentially do it from a long distance away, and may actually be hard
to detect.

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carapace
One of the interesting things that was proved in Cybernetics is that, in order
to operate efficiently, a self-governing system must have a model of itself.

A digital twin is a digital "voodoo doll", as Asa Raskin (Jef's son) talks
about in "Humane: A New Agenda for Tech" (44 min. watch) posted on April 23,
2019 [https://humanetech.com/newagenda/](https://humanetech.com/newagenda/)

A self-aware city is an efficient, healthy, safe city.

~~~
compiler-guy
> A self-aware city is an efficient, healthy, safe city.

I don't see how efficient, healthy, and safe follow from self-aware.

Self awareness _may_ enable such things, but it is easy to see how they could
also enable a dystopia.

~~~
misterprime
Just don't think differently than the city managers and you'll be fine.

/s

~~~
antonvs
If you have no bad thoughts to hide, you have nothing to fear!

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krrishd
(Still) looking for a link to the PDF of it, but I’m reminded of David’s
Gelernter’s “Mirror World” concept from the 1990s
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_world)),
encountered it in one of my classes.

This is the second time something on HN actively reminded me of it funnily
enough
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532236)

~~~
aspenmayer
Google result #1 for query:

David’s Gelernter’s “Mirror World” filetype:pdf

[http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-
attachments/2745202/074de53e96...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-
attachments/2745202/074de53e9672f70dd29b9e9ea934e045.pdf)

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antoineMoPa
What if the future resides in active transport + mass transit (and not
cars)...

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llsf
Should each vehicle be autonomous and make its own decision based on the data
that it can capture around (light/sound i.e. radio waves) and possibly open
trusted data (maps, traffic, weather, etc.) rather than being dumb and follow
a control center that can fail, be abused or get hacked ? I guess one who
control the traffic data source, could influence the vehicle's decisions.
Vehicles could talk to each other and propagate traffic information, but again
vehicles have to trust each other. It comes down to a trust issue.

~~~
wil421
Should the car protect the driver or the other people around it?

If you have a hypothetical situation where the car is driving lawfully and a
family jumps into the road. Assume the car has only two options. Does the
computer hit the family or swerve into the telephone pole? Even if the
computer believes turning will kill the driver.

2 cars talk to each other and realize one will need to turn to avoid an
accident. Assume only 1 driver will survive. Which car does what? What if both
computers turn and there are bystanders on both sides?

~~~
oh_sigh
Yeah, these points are constantly brought up with self driving car tech and
are honestly extremely boring. The cars will just slam on the brakes as the
most effective way to avoid an accident. No software is going to look at the
number of passengers or the value of passengers and decide which car needs to
be sacrificed for the greater good.

Self-driving cars don't need to be programmed to be the ultimate moral
arbiters of life. They just need to be safer than human drivers. What would
optimal human drivers do in the instance that a family jumps out into the
middle of the road? Probably just slam on the brakes. Not send their car head
first into a semi trailer moving in the opposite direction.

~~~
rootusrootus
Exactly. We already advise people that swerving is significantly more
dangerous than just slamming on the brakes and maintaining some semblance of
car control. That advice still applies when a computer is doing the driving.
Longitudinal grip is a lot more reliable in various conditions than lateral
grip, so that's what you go with.

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JokerDan
Here in the UK we have 'smart motorways' that show lanes as closed and over a
few miles, guide traffic into a queues but people still don't obey then
completely and end up contributing to the messy traffic.

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malandrew
How anyone thinks that cities are competent enough to do any of the
fantastical scenarios described in the article is beyond me. This is going to
be a huge waste of taxpayer dollars and we're going to end up with an
expensive boondoggle that makes things worse than if they has just left things
along and let the marketplace sort things out. Once such systems are baked
into place, it's going to be hard to undo the damage they cause.

