Digital Twin Based Trajectory Prediction for Platoons of Connected Intelligent Vehicles

Vehicle platooning is one of the advanced driving applications expected to be supported by the 5G vehicle to everything (V2X) communications. It holds great potentials on improving road efficiency, driving safety and fuel efficiency. Apart from the organization and internal communication of the platoons, real-time prediction of surrounding road users (such as vehicles and cyclists) is another critical issue. While artificial intelligence (AI) is receiving increasing interests on its application to trajectory prediction, there is a potential problem that the pre-trained neural network models may not well fit the current driving environment and needs online fine-tuning to maintain an acceptable high prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a digital twin based real-time trajectory prediction scheme for platoons of connected intelligent vehicles. In this scheme the head vehicle of a platoon senses the surrounding vehicles. A LSTM neural network is applied for real-time trajectory prediction with the sensing outcomes. The head vehicle controls the offloading of the trajectory data and maintains a digital twin to optimize the update of LSTM model. In the digital twin a Deep-Q Learning (DQN) algorithm is utilized for adaptive fine tuning of the LSTM model, to ensure the prediction accuracy and minimize the consumption of communication and computing resources. A real-world dataset is developed from the KITTI datasets for simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed trajectory prediction scheme can maintain a prediction accuracy for safe platooning and reduce the delay of updating the neural networks by up to 40%.