Testing cooperative intelligent transport systems in distributed simulators

Simulation is often used as a technique to test and evaluate systems, as it provides a cost-efficient and safe alternative for testing and evaluation. A combination of simulators can be used to create high-fidelity and realistic test scenarios, especially when the systems-under-test are complex. An example of such complex systems is Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS), which include many actors that are connected to each other via wireless communication in order to interact and cooperate. The majority of the actors in the systems are vehicles equipped with wireless communication modules, which can range from fully autonomous vehicles to manually driven vehicles. In order to test and evaluate C-ITS, this paper presents a distributed simulation framework that consists of (a) a moving base driving simulator; (b) a real-time vehicle simulator; and (c) network and traffic simulators. We present our approach for connecting and co-simulating the simulators. We report on limitation and performance that this simulation framework can achieve. Lastly, we discuss potential benefits and feasibility of using the simulation framework for testing of C-ITS. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.