This city of 42,000 residents continues a longstanding relationship with the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) to develop its “Atrium” initiative at the city-owned Curiosity Lab innovation center, placing the university in the same space as technology startups and other efforts to grow smart city applications. This first Atrium, which opened late last month, will function as a form of research facility, technology incubator and workspace putting students in the same orbit as next-gen technology initiatives. Others are envisioned elsewhere in the U.S. and around the world.
“We have learners and research and development activities all around the world, and the Atria will help build and strengthen those networks,” Dr. Stephen Harmon, executive director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech, said. The Center, which resides within Georgia Tech’s new College of Lifetime Learning, is a “living laboratory” supporting tech innovation and online courses for students enrolled for both credit and non-credit. (The Center refers to its students as “learners.”)
The site, Harmon said, will serve to test Atrium offerings.
“It is just far enough away that it is not a part of our Atlanta campus, and still close enough to allow us easy access to create and test new products and services,” he said.
The city is also working with the company BizzTech to create a digital twin of its downtown, enabling a photorealistic view of its operations. The digital twin will provide “machine learning models a safe sandbox to train on high‑fidelity traffic scenarios before they’re ever exposed to real drivers,” Brian Johnson, Peachtree Corners city manager, said via email. The city’s long‑term goal, he said, is to make quicker, smart decisions, particularly in public safety and urban planning, while keeping costs down.
Digital twin technology allows cities to test infrastructure ideas, explore new forms of mobility and even train AI tools. Peachtree Corners will use BizzTech’s metaverse technology to rehearse incident response protocols, improve traffic signal timing and model the planned expansion of autonomous vehicle corridors before the vehicles are deployed, the city manager said.
“Digital twin technology has given cities the opportunity to optimize decision-making as they continue to grow and change in real time,” he said.
Peachtree Corners is also teaming with NVIDIA to introduce edge AI technology to help round out its smart city ecosystem, supporting new technologies for intelligent transportation systems, curb management and other forms of “smart mobility.” These systems are supported by the city’s ultra-low latency 5G network, allowing algorithms to “act on sensor data in milliseconds — critical for applications such as automatic pedestrian detection, adaptive signal control and real‑time curb pricing,” Johnson said.
The developments continue the city’s tradition of creating, testing and deploying urban technology that dates to the late 1960s, when the area was the site of the business development Technology Park Atlanta.
“We treat technology as core infrastructure,” Johnson said, calling attention to the use of sensor data for fine-tuning traffic signal timing, of object-detection cameras tied into crosswalks, and smart lighting systems equipped with public Wi-Fi and AI.
“Those projects are already shaving idle emissions, guiding marshals to incidents in seconds and lighting public spaces as our population climbs,” Johnson said.
