Development and application of an integrated traffic simulation and multi-driving simulators

Professional virtual reality experiment tools, including driving simulators and traffic simulators, have their strengths and weaknesses. The integration of the two simulators will enhance the ability of both traffic modeling and driving simulation and present a new area of applications. This paper develops, implements, and validates an experimental platform that integrated a traffic simulator with multiple driving simulators (TSMDS). As a connected multi-user framework that allows multiple drivers who are simultaneously handling many driving simulators, it not only allows driver behavior experiments to be more accurate, controlled, and versatile but also simulates special driving behavior or multi-vehicle interactions under more realistic traffic flow environments. To validate the performance of TSMDS, 27 drivers were recruited to attend the lane changing experiments at a recurring on-ramp bottleneck and left-turn experiments at a two-phase signalized intersection in Shanghai. Both experiments required several drivers to drive the TSMDS and fulfill several complicated lane changing/crossing behaviors through their interaction. The results show that both the participants’ response and lane changing/crossing data that were obtained from the experiment are consistent with the field observation, which confirms the validity of the integrated platform.