This year I’m leading an exciting project called VirtualCity@Chalmers. This is an interdisciplinary research and development project initiated by the Building Futures Area of Advance at Chalmers. The aim of the project is to build a digital twin of the Chalmers campus sites Johanneberg and Lindholmen, involving 3D modeling, simulation – of traffic, pedestrian flow, heating, wind flow, air pollution, noise, flooding and more – optimization, visualization and auralization.
We are working closely with the City of Gothenburg, and in the next phase we plan to scale the simulation to the city level. Below is a mockup of our design and a target for the development this first year.
Mockup of VirtualCity@Chalmers.
I’m very happy with the project team we have managed to assemble. The team includes experts in mathematical modeling, simulation, architecture, human-computer interaction, communication, and – very importantly – game programming. We’ll be using Unreal Engine to build our frontend, while the backend will be running FEniCS solvers, IPS IBOFlow and data repositories in the cloud.
VirtualCity@Chalmers system design (preliminary sketch).
So far, we have managed to implement initial versions of all components, including a first version of the game engine/user interface, automated mesh generation, a couple of basic FEniCS solvers (Stokes and advection-diffusion), as well as getting the components talk to each other (via JSON over TCP). Some screenshots are posted below.
For more information on VirtualCity@Chalmers, make sure to follow our blog where we will be posting updates continuously.
VirtualCity@Chalmers game engine screenshot.
VirtualCity@Chalmers air pollution simulation (advection-diffusion).