A model for simulation and generation of surrounding vehicles in driving simulators

Matstoms, VTI, for their invaluable support and advices. Many thanks also to Mikael Adlers, VTI, who I have been working with during the integration and testing within the VTI Driving simulator III. He has a great part in that integration went successfully. Thanks also to the Swedish Road Administration (SRA), Ruggero Ceci, for funding this work. I would also like to show appreciation to my other colleagues at ITN/LiU and VTI, whom make ITN/LiU and VTI stimulating places to work at. Special thanks to my roommate and PhD student colleague Andreas Tapani and to my other PhD student colleagues for very interesting and useful discussions, to Arne Carlsson, VTI, for sharing his knowledge within the traffic theory and simulation area, to Anne Bolling and Selina Mård Berggren, VTI, for their help during the design and the realization of the conducted driving simulator experiment, to Lena Nilsson and Jerker Sundström, VTI, for invaluable comments, and to the members of the VTI sharing their massive experience within the driving simulator area. I would also like to express my gratitude to my family and friends for their encouragement and support. Last but not least, I would like to give all my love to Lin and to my two cuddly cats Marion and Morriz. ii iii Abstract Driving simulators are used to conduct experiments on for example driver behavior, road design, and vehicle characteristics. The results of the experiments often depend on the traffic conditions. One example is the evaluation of cellular phones and how they affect driving behavior. It is clear that the ability to use phones when driving depends on traffic intensity and composition, and that realistic experiments in driving simulators therefore has to include surrounding traffic. This thesis describes a model that generates and simulates surrounding vehicles for a driving simulator. The proposed model generates a traffic stream, corresponding to a given target flow and simulates realistic interactions between vehicles. The model is built on established techniques for time-driven microscopic simulation of traffic and uses an approach of only simulating the closest neighborhood of the driving simulator vehicle. In our model this closest neighborhood is divided into one inner region and two outer regions. Vehicles in the inner region are simulated according to advanced behavioral models while vehicles in the outer regions are updated according to a less time-consuming model. The presented work includes a new framework for generating and simulating …