Development and evaluation of a vehicle-infrastructure integration simulation architecture

Advances in information technology are making the close integration of vehicles and the infrastructure in the surface-transportation system feasible. In particular, one approach to this integration receiving significant attention and effort in the United States is referred to as vehicle-infrastructure integration (VII). While few would argue that VII possesses the potential to support applications that improve traffic safety and mobility, the level of benefits, as well as strengths/weaknesses of various design alternatives, cannot be effectively assessed without the availability of an appropriate simulation environment. The purpose of this research is to develop a simulator that can fully model the functional aspects of VII deployment. This paper identifies key requirements for development of the simulation architecture, and proposes an architecture for a VII simulation system after identifying several alternatives. The proposed architecture components include a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) traffic simulator, database, VII interface module, and multiple applications. Finally, the paper presents a prototype application of the architecture to explore the computing efficacy of the architecture. The results indicate that simulation run times are linear with respect to the number of COTS traffic simulator interruptions required to extract vehicular data, and that database access can increase computational requirements at a ratio of 14:1-reasonable for analytical purposes.