A Survey of Integrated Simulation Environments for Connected Automated Vehicles: Requirements, Tools, and Architecture

Abstract

Automated and connected vehicles are emerging in the market. Currently, solutions are being proposed to use these technologies for cooperative driving, which can significantly improve road safety. Vehicular safety applications must be tested before deployment. It is challenging to verify and validate them in the real world. Therefore, simulation is used for this purpose. Modeling this technology necessitates coupled use of traffic flow, vehicle dynamics, and communication network simulators. State-of-the-art tools exist in these domains; however, they are difficult to integrate or lack full domain coverage. This article analyzes the requirements for an integrated connected and automated vehicle simulation environment for simulating vehicular cooperative driving automation with consideration of surrounding objects’ influence. For this purpose, we have assessed the existing challenges and practices. Vehicular simulation tools, signal propagation, and cooperative perception models are reviewed and analyzed. In our review, we focus mainly on autonomous driving simulators with 3D graphical environments as they have not yet been assessed for cooperative driving task fitness. Further, the current state of connected and automated vehicle simulation studies using these tools is surveyed, including single-tool and co-simulation approaches. We discuss the shortcomings of existing methods and propose an architecture for an integrated simulation environment (ISE) with full domain coverage using open source tools. The obtained conclusions can be further used in the development of connected and automated vehicle ISEs.