ABSTRACT
This chapter 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 a time-driven microscopic simulation of traffic and uses an approach of only simulating the closest neighborhood of the driving simulator vehicle. In the presented model, this closest neighborhood is divided into one inner region and two outer regions. Vehicles in the inner region are simulated according to advanced sub-models for driving behavior, while vehicles in the outer regions are updated according to a less time-consuming model. The presented work includes a new framework for generation and simulation of vehicles within a moving area. It also includes the development of an enhanced model for overtakings and a simple mesoscopic traffic model. The developed model has been tested within the VTI Driving simulator III. A driving simulator experiment has been conducted in order to verify whether the participants observe the behavior of the simulated vehicles as realistic or not. The results were promising but also indicated that enhancements could be made. Moreover, the model was validated on the number of vehicles that caught up with the driving simulator vehicle and vice versa. The agreement was good for active and passive catch-ups on rural roads and for passive catch-ups on freeways, but less good for active catch-ups on freeways.
