Online Real-Time Simulation of Vehicles

Real-time simulation of a vehicle accessible as a server process on a network is needed in multiple use cases. One such use case is coordinated driving. Coordinated driving will eventually require us to control vehicles from the cloud. From the viewpoint of coordinated driving controller, every vehicle can be regarded as a process running somewhere on the network. One implication is that both the controller and vehicle must live with the delays introduced by the network and controller itself. The controller and vehicles must survive the test when some commands are late or lost. Commands sent to a vehicle should be time-stamped, and the vehicle should have a default policy when no command is received for a particular time point at or before that time point. It is also useful to have the model of a vehicle as a separate process and also on a separate computer (as long as it is accessible through a network) because it makes the testing of controllers cleaner, especially when the controllers are developed by different groups. It also makes the maintenance of the vehicle model and the whole simulator easier. Another possible use case is using our simulator as Hardware-In-the-Loop replacement. Results are showing that the system is well suitable for V2X applications by responding in real time to Vehicle Control Unit (VCU).