Full-Day Workshop · IEEE IV 2026 Proposal Draft
Digital twins across scales

Digital Twins for Intelligent Vehicles

DT-IV: From Agent-Level to System-Level Twins is a proposed full-day workshop focused on how digital twins are reshaping intelligent vehicles, connected infrastructure, and city-scale mobility systems. The program is designed to connect high-fidelity vehicle and scene twins with larger operational twins for corridors, cities, and policy-facing transportation platforms.

Agent-level twins System-level twins World models Validation and fidelity Real-time deployment

09:00–17:00

Tentative full-day format with keynote, technical talks, panel discussion, and cross-scale Q&A.

2 tracks

Morning focus on agent-level twins and afternoon focus on system-level twins.

Academia · Industry · Labs

Designed to bring together university researchers, national labs, mobility testbeds, and industry platform builders.

Workshop overview

Scope and aims

The workshop bridges digital twins of individual vehicles and local environments with broader twins of transportation systems, urban operations, and infrastructure management.

What the workshop covers

  • Agent-level twins for perception, planning, control, and safety assessment.
  • System-level twins for network monitoring, operations, resilience, and policy support.
  • Validation, fidelity metrics, and reproducibility across physical and virtual environments.
  • Deployment pipelines that connect sensors, simulation, compute platforms, and operational decision support.

Expected outcomes

  • Clarify how digital twins connect testing, simulation, and real-world deployment.
  • Compare design patterns for multi-scale twin architectures.
  • Share practical workflows for data ingestion, synchronization, scenario generation, and evaluation.
  • Strengthen collaboration across transportation, robotics, AI, and infrastructure communities.
Research-informed speaker themes

Updated topic framing

These short descriptions refine the proposal language using recent speaker, lab, and project materials related to digital twins, physical AI, and transportation systems.

Henry X. Liu

University of Michigan · Mcity

Recent Mcity work emphasizes open-source test-facility twins, remote-access experimentation, and tighter integration between physical proving grounds and virtual validation environments. His keynote is framed around how AV evaluation can move from controlled test tracks toward scalable, naturalistic and eventually city-connected digital twin ecosystems.

Jiawei Wang

University of Michigan

The proposal now highlights mixed digital twins for vehicle-road-cloud integration, cooperative control, and modern scenario generation. This better reflects his work spanning mixed-reality validation, multi-vehicle experimentation, and newer generative simulation directions such as TeraSim and TeraSim-World.

William He

University of Delaware

The topic description is aligned with the University of Delaware Scaled Smart City line of work, where digital twins support closed-loop algorithm development before physical deployment. The emphasis is on indoor CAV testbeds that reduce the gap between clean simulation and error-prone real-world implementation.

Minghan Zhu / Yue Hu

University of Michigan · Mcity

The revised wording stresses high-fidelity visual twins, scenario generation, and sensor-realistic virtual environments. This better fits ongoing Mcity and broader AV research trends around visual world building, sim-to-real transfer, and physically grounded digital replicas for perception evaluation.

Yang Zhou

Texas A&M University

The proposal now foregrounds digital-twin-enhanced active safety analysis in mixed traffic. The talk description centers on integrating multi-source roadway data, high-fidelity simulation, and AI-based safety analytics to assess interactions among automated and human-driven vehicles.

Zilin Bian

Rochester Institute of Technology

The system-level session description is sharpened toward risk-aware urban mobility twins, real-time traffic sensing, and safety-informed city analytics. This reflects both DT-DIMA-style risk-aware mobility analytics and more recent urban digital twin work for emergency-response planning.

ORNL RealTwin Team

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The updated text emphasizes scenario-driven digital twins, photo-realistic corridor and city construction pipelines, and anything-in-the-loop evaluation. It also connects ORNL’s CAVE and Real-Sim environments to hardware-linked validation of intelligent mobility strategies.

NVIDIA Cosmos

Affiliation: NVIDIA

Focus on world foundation models for physical AI, synthetic data generation, video processing, evaluation, and post-training workflows that support scalable digital twin and simulation ecosystems.

Tianming Liu

Affiliation: University of Michigan

Focus on AI-driven city and infrastructure twins for planning, resilience, and intelligent urban decision support, complementing the physical AI and synthetic data perspective with urban-scale deployment and analytics.

Organizing team

Workshop organizers

The organizing team combines expertise in transportation systems, digital twins, simulation, AI, and intelligent mobility deployment.

Fan Zuo

C2SMART Center, New York University · Lead organizer · fan.zuo@nyu.edu

Hanlin Chen

Oak Ridge National Laboratory · Lead organizer · chenh1@ornl.gov

Zilin Bian

Rochester Institute of Technology · zxbite@rit.edu

Kaan Ozbay

C2SMART Center, New York University · kaan.ozbay@nyu.edu