There is a lot of talk about making better use of data to improve transport. This relies on the concept of digitalisation of stuff – the physical things, processes and concepts used to make transport safe, clean, efficient etc. Before you know it, we are talking about “digital twins”. And it is at this point that things start to get really vague. While there are some very good technical definitions of digital twins, they don’t make a lot of sense in the transport domain. Peter Lindgren, Head of Digitisation at TRL, offers up a simple explanation of digital twins in this primer, distinguishing them by examples from digital models and digital shadows, each of which has an important role to play in the exploitation of transport data.
