Reducing the gap between simulated and real life environments by introducing high-precision data

Abstract

The Institute of Transportation Systems of the German Aerospace Center recently started operating a large-scale research facility called Application Platform for Intelligent Mobility (AIM) to support the development and evaluation of Intelligent Transport Systems and mobility applications in the urban area of Braunschweig, Germany. The overarching goals are to improve safety for all traffic participants, to increase efficiency of traffic flows, and to protect resources. An important part of this new research facility is to provide a reference track on a public road surrounding the downtown, which will be equipped with ITS Roadside Stations for Vehicle-to-X (V2X) communication and additional sensors (e.g. cameras) for comprehensive data collection. Also communication to a traffic management centre and distribution of data to vulnerable road users and passengers via one of the regular WLAN standards is envisaged. One important purpose of the reference track is the development and efficient field operational test of ITS applications that use V2X communication. Before testing new applications or algorithms in a realistic environment it is necessary to evaluate them in a simulation, first. AIM will support this development step by providing a virtual counterpart to the reference track. A large part of Braunschweig is digitally represented with the help of a GIS database developed by a tool chain called SimWorld Urban. A virtual landscape (as a 3D model) and a logical road description (using the de facto standard OpenDRIVE) are automatically generated out of real world data (like cadastral plans, road measurement, aerial photographs, navigation data, etc.). By providing a higher level of reality the currently existing gap between simulation and test trial results will be significantly reduced and therefore significantly lowers the risk of conducting potentially expensive field operational tests with immature applications. The paper will explain the concept of this approach and its challenges.