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The world is dealing with a number of disputes in the domain of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) that requires the solution to alleviate traffic congestion, decrease vehicle emissions and increase road safety. Autonomous and connected vehicles (ACVs) are considered as a promising alternate for these transportation issues. Explicitly, the connected and autonomous (CA) vehicles incorporated with artificial intelligence (AI), seamless vehicular communication connection, and ubiquitous sensors are assisting to develop the techniques for advanced level of vehicle automation, and primarily upgrading the road transport system with advance features (Llatser, 2017).
Given the fact that, soon the intelligent transport system will appear on highways where ACVs and human driven vehicles coexist. A communication between human driven, CA vehicles together with the extensive applications of artificial intelligence for situational awareness could bring more suspicions and risks regarding traffic efficiency and safety. Hence, a complete assessment of CAD is crucial prior to its complete deployment in real-life, that could also be effectively and economically deployed with reliable simulation platforms.
For a particular transport functional verification there are several existing vehicular simulation platforms, i.e., SUMO for traffic flow modelling, CARLA for autonomous vehicle design and OMNET++ for V2X communication etc as seen in the Figure 1. To explore the interface between the vehicular mobility and communication, some integrated simulators have also been developed by combining the traffic simulators and the communication simulators (Tahir, Fatima, & Bashir, 2020; Vieira, 2019a), e.g., OMNET++ and the Veins with SUMO.
Figure 1.
Intelligent Transport System V2X application with Connected and Automated Vehicles
Nevertheless, the fundamental components of traffic simulations, traffic environments and vehicle modelling are generalized (Tahir, Fatima, & Bashir, 2020; Vieira, 2019b) in the existing solutions. Particularly, the recent traffic simulators generally simplified the operational functioning of the ACVs. It offers incremental advances in the traditional road traffic modelling techniques that could not reveal the features of the real-time CA vehicles specifically in terms of intelligent transportation and control decisions. Additionally, the geometric features that might affect the driving behavior considerably i.e. road condition (surface friction) and gradient have not been completely considered in current vehicular-following simulation set-ups. On the other side, the typical simulator for autonomous vehicular system only focuses on the distinct verification functionality of some specific traffic set-ups (Javed et al., 2016). It ignores the network-level assessment by incorporating both V2X communication and large-scale traffic networks which can considerably obstruct the smooth shifting of connected and autonomous vehicles from prototypes to industrialized vehicle manufacturing (Tahir, Sukuvaara, & Katz, 2020). Therefore, it is still lacking a solution that might deliver the integrated and reliable platform simulating the CAD estimation starting from distinctive phase to the extensive network level (Cianci, 2008). In this article we have designed a complete virtual platform for CAD from a perspective of road transport cyber physical system including the fundamental elements of the ACVs, autonomous vehicles, V2X communication and road networks (Cianci, 2006; Teixeira & Oliveira, 2019). For V2X communication, there are many technologies that are available to be implemented for experimental purposes that can be seen in the Figure 2. The structure of the paper is as follows, the section two describes the framework design and in section three we discussed the simulation environment, the section four illustrates the results and discussion followed by the section five of conclusion.
Figure 2.
V2X Communication Technologies