Extended Driving Simulator for Evaluation of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems

Vehicles in cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) often need to interact with each other in order to achieve their goals, safe and efficient transport services. Since human drivers are still expected to be involved in C-ITS, driving simulators are appropriate tools for evaluation of the C-ITS functions. However, driving simulators often simplify the interactions or influences from the ego vehicle on the traffic. Moreover, they normally do not support vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) communication, which is the main enabler for C-ITS. Therefore, to increase the C-ITS evaluation capability, a solution on how to extend a driving simulator with traffic and network simulators to handle cooperative systems is presented as a result of this paper. Evaluation of the result using two use cases is presented. And, the observed limitations and challenges of the solution are reported and discussed.