IDS 3D City: A Digital Scaled Smart City

As the demand for connected and automated vehicles emerges, so to does the need for quality testing environments to support their development. In this paper, we introduce a Unity-based virtual simulation environment for emerging mobility systems, called Information and Decision Science Lab's Scaled Smart Digital City (IDS 3D City), intended to operate alongside its physical peer and its existing control framework. By utilizing the Robot Operation System, AirSim, and Unity, we have constructed a simulation environment capable of iteratively designing experiments significantly faster than is possible in a physical testbed. This provides us with an intermediate step to validate the effectiveness of our control framework prior to testing them in the physical testbed. Another benefit provided by the IDS 3D City is demonstrating that our control algorithms work independent of the physical vehicle dynamics, since the vehicle dynamics introduced by AirSim operate at a different scale than our scaled smart city. We finally demonstrate the effectiveness of our digital environment by performing an experiment in both virtual and physical environments.