GreenTwin: Developing a Digital Twin for Sustainable Cooperative Mobility and Logistics in Rural Areas

Public transportation is often poorly developed, especially in rural areas, which leads to an increased dependence on personal vehicles. Moreover, since transportation is one of the main drivers of climate change, our research project aims to explore cost-effective methods for sustainable last-mile logistics in rural areas and support decision-makers utilizing a dashboard. For this purpose, an open marketplace platform is planned that intelligently networks suppliers and service providers in a region and bundles orders and deliveries. The aim is also to motivate customers and users to behave in a more environmentally friendly way by suggesting appropriate offers through the way they are presented on the marketplace. This is achieved by integrating Digital Twin (DT) technologies, cognitive agent-based social simulation, transport management systems and recommendation systems. To ensure the project aligns with public needs and acceptance of proposed approaches, we conduct census-representative surveys alongside the development and experimentation phases. In this paper, the overall structure of the research project and the submodels underpinning our solution are introduced. It also includes a visual mockup of a rural region’s DT and introduces several use cases