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Stockholm Virtual City

This project aims to revolutionize the way cities are managed using AI, some taxis and the smartphone in your pocket.

En av de mobiltelefoner som används i bilar i Stockholm Virtual City i bruk. Foto: Univrses.

The world is becoming urbanized. People are moving from rural to urban centers at a rate of 1.3 million per week. As a result, the complexity of managing the city and its infrastructure is increasing dramatically. Key assets (bridges, tunnels, and roads), on-going projects (road works, construction sites) and evolving situations (crowds, traffic, parking, and crime) all need to be managed. Problems are compounded by climate change and life-quality concerns. As a result, there is a growing need for new solutions to make cities more sustainable and liveable.

The first crucial step to addressing many of these problems is obtaining timely, relevant and actionable data about the urban environment. Data enables a more complete understanding of the city. This understanding drives better decisions and means resources can be prioritized. Data from different sources can be combined to generate "digital twins": virtual representations of the urban environment that can be used to analyse, predict and control what is happening - all for the benefit of the citizens. Using digital twins, problems can be detected quickly and then promptly solved; given sufficient data, some can even be anticipated.

The objective of the Sthlm Virtual City project is to address the need for timely, relevant and actionable data. The consortium, composed of Stockholm Stad, Univrses AB, and Taxi Stockholm, will attach smartphones to a fleet of taxis from Taxi Stockholm. The smartphones will be loaded with Univrses’ perception software, 3DAI™ Engine. This software, originally developed to give autonomous cars the ability to make sense of their surroundings, consists of computer vision and AI components. The software processes images from the smartphone camera to detect and map urban features. Stockholm Stad can use this data to manage the infrastructure in Stockholm in a smarter way. The consortium is building a pioneering system that can update a digital twin of Stockholm in real-time. It will revolutionise the way cities are run by delivering recent and accurate data to enable better decisions to be made.

Within the Sthlm Virtual City project, clear objectives have been defined. These objectives have been selected because they include novel scientific contributions and will be enablers of future research. Achieving them will also deliver solutions to practical problems.

Objectives:

  • Real-time traffic sign mapping and health monitoring
  • Real-time fleet mapping and geofencing
  • Real-time traffic flow and congestion insights
  • Real-time pedestrians and crowd distribution

Results

The results have been evaluated from three criteria: Coverage of the road network Accuracy and robustness in detection of the signs How the solution affects the current way of working All goals where fulfilled and all functionality tested and verified during the project. In addition to this many new areas for development has been identified and the project has resulted in something very valueable.

The project was built around three main work package clusters: Preliminary Tasks, that comprehends the WPs preliminary to the actual solution development; Edge Computation, that comprends the software that will be executed on smartphones; Cloud Computation, that represent the pipeline that will operate on the cloud server. The work was executed with an iterative approach, whereby the requirements, development, integration and validation with tests will be carried out in sequential phases with feedback from the previous phase driving improvements in the following.

The final report

Project period
2020-01-02 - 2021-12-06

Contact
pier.luigi@univrses.com

Project partners
Univrses, Stockholms stad, Taxi Stockholm

Vinnova number
2019-05095