Transportation infrastructure is central to economic development and the daily lives of citizens. However, rapid urbanization, increasing vehicle ownership, and growing concerns about sustainable development have significantly heightened the complexity of managing these systems. Although digital twin (DT) technology holds great promise, most current research focuses on specific areas, lacking a comprehensive framework that spans the entire lifecycle of transportation infrastructure, from planning and construction to operation and maintenance. The technical challenges of integrating different DT systems remain unclear, which to some extent limits the potential of DT technology in the management of transportation infrastructure. To address this gap, this review first summarizes the fundamental concepts and architectures involved in DT systems for transportation infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, tunnels, and hubs. From a lifecycle perspective, DT systems for transportation infrastructure are categorized based on functional scope, data integration methods, and application stages, and their key technologies and basic frameworks are outlined. Subsequently, the potential applications of DT in various lifecycle stages of transportation infrastructure—planning and construction, operation and maintenance, and decommissioning and renewal—are analyzed, and current research progress is reviewed and discussed. Finally, the challenges and future directions for achieving a full lifecycle DT system for transportation infrastructure, encompassing technical, operational, and ethical aspects, are discussed and summarized. The insights gained herein will be valuable for researchers, urban planners, engineers, and policymakers.

The surface defects on a shield subway tunnel can significantly affect the serviceability of the tunnel structure and may compromise operation safety. To effectively detect multiple surface defects, this study uses a tunnel inspection trolley (TIT) based on the mobile laser scanning technique. By conducting an inspection of the shield tunnel on a metro line section, various surface defects are identified with the TIT, including water leakage defects, dislocation, spalling, cross-section deformation, etc. To explore the root causes of the surface defects, association rules between different defects are calculated using an improved Apriori algorithm. The results show that: (i) there are significant differences in different association rules for various surface defects on the shield tunnel; (ii) the average confidence of the association rule “dislocation & spalling → water leakage” is as high as 57.78%, indicating that most of the water leakage defects are caused by dislocation and spalling of the shield tunnel in the sections being inspected; (iii) the weakest rule appears at “water leakage → spalling”, with an average confidence of 13%. The association analysis can be used for predicting the critical defects influencing structural reliability and operation safety, such as water leakage, and optimizing the construction and maintenance work for a shield subway tunnel.

The occurrence of fatal traffic accidents often causes serious casualties and property losses, endangering travel safety. This work uses the statistical data of fatal road traffic accidents in Shenzhen from 2018 to 2022 as the basis to determine the characteristic patterns and the main influencing factors of the occurrence of fatal road traffic accidents. The accident description data are also analyzed using the analysis method based on Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) data mining to obtain the characteristics of accident fields, objects, and types. Furthermore, this work conducts a kernel density analysis combined with spatial autocorrelation to determine the hotspot areas of accident occurrence and analyze their spatial aggregation effects. A principal component analysis is performed to calculate the factors related to the accident subjects. Results showed that weak safety awareness of motorists and irregular driving operations are the main factors for the occurrence of accidents. Finally, targeted safety management strategies are proposed based on the analysis results. In the current data era, the research results of this paper can be used for the prevention and emergency of accidents to formulate corresponding measures, and provide a theoretical basis for decision making.

High-precision and rapid detection of apparent defects in subway tunnel linings is crucial for ensuring the structural integrity of tunnels and the safety of train operations. However, current methods often do not adequately account for the spatial characteristics of these defects and perform poorly in detecting and extracting small-scale defects, which limits the accuracy of detection and geometric parameter extraction. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient algorithm for detecting and extracting apparent defects in subway tunnels. Firstly, YOLOv8 was selected as the foundational architecture due to its comprehensive performance. The coordinate attention module and Bottleneck Transformer 3 were then integrated into the model’s backbone to enhance the focus on defect-prone areas and improve the learning of feature relationships between defects and other infrastructure. Subsequently, a high-resolution detection layer was added to the model’s head to further improve sensitivity to subtle defects. Additionally, a low-quality crack dataset was created using an open access dataset, and transfer learning combined with Real-ESRGAN was employed to enhance the detail and resolution of fine cracks. The results of the field experiments demonstrate that the proposed model significantly improves detection accuracy in high-incidence areas and for small-scale defects, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 87% in detecting cracks, leakage, exfoliation, and related infrastructure defects. Furthermore, the crack enhancement techniques substantially improve the representation of fine-crack details, increasing feature extraction accuracy by a factor of four. The findings of this paper could provide crucial technical support for the automated operation and maintenance of metro tunnels.

With accelerating urbanization, vehicle conflict risk identification has become a critical research focus for improving road traffic safety. To address the discrepancies between microscopic traffic simulation outputs and real-world traffic flow characteristics caused by stochastic factors, this study proposes a vehicle conflict risk identification framework based on an enhanced intelligent driver model (IDM). Through VISSIM secondary development and scenario calibration, a simulation environment was constructed to replicate real-world road test conditions. Multi-vehicle trajectory data were employed to calibrate the IDM parameters. The conventional IDM was further improved by integrating driver-state variables and braking dynamics, while the inverse time to collision (ITTC) was adopted as the primary metric for collision risk assessment. Three risk levels were defined: potential collision (PC), general collision (GC), and serious collision (SC). The experimental results demonstrated strong alignment between the enhanced model and VISSIM simulations in vehicle speed and headway calibration, achieving classification accuracy rates exceeding 92.71%. The ITTC thresholds (0.25/s and 0.48/s) effectively differentiated between risk levels. This research provides theoretical and technical foundations for dynamic vehicle conflict risk identification and offers actionable insights for safety-critical decision making in intelligent driving systems.

As vehicles with high accident and casualty rates within the road transportation system, engineering vehicles have been receiving much attention and emphasis in terms of safety. Accurate analyses and evaluations of risk factors in vehicle operation are imperative for enhancing the management level of engineering vehicles. This study explores the differences between various types of drivers by analyzing the driving characteristics of professional drivers. The evaluation index system is developed and quantified by integrating factors related to engineering vehicle drivers, road environment, and industry management. Additionally, the risk assessment model is developed using the error backpropagation algorithm. The optimal model is determined by comparing the number of nodes in different hidden layers, the activation function, and regularization optimization. The prediction accuracy of this model’s coefficient of determination is 0.912, indicating that the model has validity. This study is conducive to improving the safety level of engineering vehicle operation in order to reduce the rate of vehicle traffic accidents, the severity of accidents, and the consequences of losses. It also has practical application value in safeguarding social security.