EXPLORATORY ADVANCED RESEARCH

Breakthroughs in Vision and Visibility for Highway Safety Workshop Summary Report - August 13-14, 2014

Chapter 2. Methodology

This report draws on the following three sets of inputs: (1) a detailed review of literature on connected simulators and models, (2) discussions at a workshop on distributed driving simulation held in January 2016 at the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, and (3) interviews with selected officials at FHWA whose offices use simulation and modeling in their research programs. The following sections detail each of these inputs.

Literature Review

The research team identified journal articles, technical reports, theses, and other information and placed them into six categories: (1) multiple simulations in transportation, (2) virtual environments, (3) implementation and validation, (4) federated simulation, (5) semantic approaches, and (6) interoperability and model integration. The research team included additional articles if they referenced the original articles or if they were referenced in this report.

TRB Workshop on Distributed Driving Simulation

A workshop titled “Cross-Modal Distributed Simulation” (specifically driving simulation) took place on January 10, 2016 at the TRB Annual Meeting in Washington, DC (see appendix A), co-chaired by Maura Lohrenz (Division Chief, Aviation Human Factors, Volpe) and Donald Fisher (Principal Technical Advisor, Surface Transportation Human Factors, Volpe). Panelists included some of the world’s leading experts on distributed asynchronous, distributed synchronous, and cross-modal and cross-platform driving simulation (see appendix B). Workshop attendees represented a broad range of Federal and State agencies, private companies, and universities (see appendix B).

The typical highway transportation research study using driving simulators involves one lab operating one simulator, designing its own scenarios, and testing potential solutions to single-mode problems from one agent’s viewpoint (e.g., driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist). This workshop was focused on two related questions. First, what use cases would motivate expansions in highway research simulation infrastructure beyond the standalone, single-mode, and single-platform functionality to encompass distributed asynchronous, distributed synchronous, cross-modal, and cross-platform functionality? Second, what are the technical issues that stand in the way of that expansion? The technical issues for the driving simulation community are mostly specific to the community of researchers at universities, whose resources are often strained both in terms of the technical personnel required to operate complex driving simulators and the funds required to purchase, operate, and maintain them.

The workshop participants generated numerous use cases and identified several technical issues that remain to be resolved before connected driving simulators in all of their various forms are widely available. Use cases were not generated with any particular transportation agency or mission in mind. Rather, they were meant simply to illustrate areas of research where advances in simulation would be needed to answer critical basic and applied research questions in highway transportation research. An in-depth discussion of the use cases and technical issues is included in appendix A.

FHWA Interviews

The research team conducted interviews in April 2016 with FHWA staff from the Office of Safety; Office of Operations; Office of Planning, Environment, and Realty; and Office of Transportation Policy Studies. Interviewees discussed how simulation in general is currently used in their area, how they are using connected simulators (if at all), and what new problems might be solved with the use of connected simulators. The general finding was that many new problems could be solved in safety, operations, planning, and policy at all levels if more was known about connected simulators, connected models, and connected simulators and models.