Award winning metaverse startup Hadean, and Connected Places Catapult, the UK’s innovation accelerator for cities, transport, and place leadership, have been awarded a UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) grant to create a new offering in the transportation sector.
The 2-year long project will aim to develop a traffic simulation digital twin that can scale to a large number of entities (cars, standard HGVs, eHGVs, charging points, electric overhead cables), replicate motorways and highways in the UK and study the optimal locations for charging infrastructure and electric road systems.
Using historical data and Hadean’s cloud computing platform, the 3D environment will also help assess how electric road systems might affect the flow of traffic and how infrastructure needs to be built to support them.
This will enable a greater alignment between Hadean’s computing technology and the modelling capability and permit extensive and complex road networks to be modelled, stress-tested, and subjected to “what-if?” analyses. Challenges around scale of simulation, spatial computation, complexity and extent of exploration will be addressed using technologies Hadean has developed for connecting and scaling virtual worlds for metaverse, gaming, and defence.
Connected Places Catapult will provide technical support and guidance to Hadean via a specialist knowledge transfer associate, who will act as a liaison between the Catapult’s experts and the product team at Hadean. Specifically, the Catapult will advise on transport modelling and digital twin applications, supporting Hadean to develop mathematical and agent-based simulation models for road transportation. The Catapult team will also help Hadean overcome challenges around the acquisition and use of relevant data in the development of digital twins.
The grant demonstrates a growing interest in the public and private transportation sectors for scalable, agent-based models that can boost the development of modern, eco-friendly transportation.
Source: Connected Places Catapult
