Traditional road asset management relies on periodic, often inefficient, inspections. Digital Twins offer a paradigm shift towards proactive, data-driven maintenance by creating a real-time virtual replica of physical infrastructure. This paper proposes a comprehensive, formalized framework for a highway Digital Twin, structured into three integrated components: a Physical Space, which defines key performance indicators through mathematical state vectors; a Data Interconnection layer for real-time data processing; and a Virtual Space equipped with hybrid models. We provide a formal definition of these state vectors and a dynamic synchronization mechanism between the physical and virtual spaces. In this study, we focused on pavement condition assessment by using a data-driven component using accessible technology. This study show the synergy between the Digital Twin and deep learning, specifically by integrating advanced analytical models within the Virtual Space for intelligent pavement condition assessment. To validate this approach, a case study was conducted to classify road surface anomalies using low-cost Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. We evaluated several machine learning classifiers and introduced a novel parallel Gated Recurrent Unit network. The results demonstrate that our proposed architecture achieved superior performance, with an accuracy of 89.5% and an F1-score of 0.875, significantly outperforming traditional methods. The findings validate the viability of the proposed Digital Twin framework and highlight its potential to achieve high-precision pavement monitoring using low-cost sensor data, a critical step towards intelligent road infrastructure management.
Gurrola-Mijares et al. (Fri,) studied this question.