Integration of Driving and Traffic Simulation: Perspectives and First Solutions

Driving simulators are the most suitable test bed for the evaluation and development of intelligent transportation system (ITS) technologies like e.g. cooperative systems. Indeed, impacts of these systems on the behavior of individual drivers can be thoroughly analyzed by means of driving simulators only if autonomous vehicles in the driving scenario move according to the system under evaluation. This would imply that simulation of the traffic surrounding the interactive vehicle would already take into account behavior under analysis. At present, this ?loop? is not tackled properly, and effects on individuals and traffic are evaluated separately and often independently. Instead, the coupling of traffic and driving simulations could well provide a more consistent solution to this complex evaluation problem. The integration of traffic and driving simulations thus opens up new scenarios for combined development and for enhancing the ability of both traffic modeling and driving simulation to emulate credible scenarios. For instance, the driving simulation environment makes actual drivers directly interact with driver/traffic models and allows such models to be tested and analyzed also against non-normative driver behavior; being the only current way to test models for such situations and to open up traffic modeling to safety evaluation. Basically this is the idea behind the present work that led to the integration of a driving simulation engine, SCANeR, and a microscopic traffic simulation model, AIMSUN. Methodological and technical issues of the integration are first presented and future enhancements to allow higher consistency of the two simulation environments are finally envisaged.