Supervised by Dr Ivan Ho, our MSc in EIE programme graduate, Miss Tingting Fan, obtained the Outstanding Student Award in the IEEE International Conference on Digital Twins and Parallel Intelligence (DTPI) 2022 for her research work on "Digital Twin-Assisted Lane-changing and Variable Speed Limit Control for Weaving Segments". In this work, a joint traffic and network simulator is established to construct the digital twin system, and two traffic control strategies, namely the lane-changing (LC) distribution strategy and the variable speed limit (VSL) control strategy, are proposed and validated in a complex highway weaving segment environment. The results show that communication packet loss negatively affects the performance of V2X-assisted LC control, which is usually neglected in the field of transport studies. However, by integrating the LC control with the proposed reinforcement learning based VSL control, we can improve the overall average speed of vehicles on highway weaving segments by more than 40% compared with the LC control alone.
