Integrated Environment of Driving and Traffic Simulation

Evaluation of ITS technologies like cooperative systems calls for driving simulations of complex traffic environments. Impacts of these systems on behaviour of individual drivers can be thoroughly evaluated by means of driving simulators only if autonomous vehicles in the driving scenario move accordingly to the systems under evaluation. This entails that the simulation of the traffic surrounding the interactive vehicle has already taken into account the behaviours under analysis. The solution of this “loop” can be speeded up in a common development environment of driving and traffic simulation. This is the idea behind the present work that has led to the software integration of a driving simulation engine, SCANeR, and a microscopic traffic simulation model, AIMSUN. Methodological and technical issues of the integration as well as results of the first tests are presented along the paper