Smart City Digital Twins for Public Safety: A Deep Learning and Simulation Based Method for Dynamic Sensing and Decision-Making

Technological innovations are expanding rapidly in the public safety sector providing opportunities for more targeted and comprehensive urban crime deterrence and detection. Yet, the spatial dispersion of crimes may vary over time. Therefore, it is unclear whether and how sensors can optimally impact crime rates. We developed a Smart City Digital Twin-based method to dynamically place license plate reader (LPR) sensors and improve their detection and deterrence performance. Utilizing continuously updated crime records, the convolutional long short-term memory algorithm predicted areas crimes were most likely to occur. Then, a Monte Carlo traffic simulation simulated suspect vehicle movements to determine the most likely routes to flee crime scenes. Dynamic LPR placement predictions were made weekly, capturing the spatiotemporal variation in crimes and enhancing LPR performance relative to static placement. We tested the proposed method in Warner Robins, GA, and results support the method's promise in detecting and deterring crime.