Smartahs: a Simulation Framework for Automated Vehicles and Highway Systems

SmartAHS is a software framework for the uniform speciication, simulation, and objective evaluation of Intelligent Vehicle Highway System (IVHS) alternatives. This paper illustrates the use of the object-oriented paradigm in its design, implementation and use. Objective comparison of proposed highway automation alternatives is achieved, when all control architectures are speciied in SmartAHS. The framework implementation is decomposed into three layers. A core set of entities, called SmartDb, implement the base classes of the framework, the scheduling mechanism, and a special syntax for a state machine formalism. The second layer, SmartAHS customizes these classes and implements entities speciic to highway automation. The control and communication engineers are the users of SmartAHS; they further customize it to implement speciic simulation applications such as SmartPATH. The users of the applications are system analysts and system planners. We discuss the design and implementation of SmartDb and SmartAHS and give a use-case example of a subset of SmartPATH.