EXPLORATORY ADVANCED RESEARCH

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

Chapter 4. Conclusion

There are many potential advances in transportation safety, operations, planning, and policy if the simulators and models used had a much higher level of interoperability. For such advances to take place, there needs to be improvement, not only in interoperability, but in the software that is the brains of the simulators and models and in the hardware that is the brawn. This also requires models to communicate across different sites with lags as small as 50 ms. With such advances, one can potentially make progress on the many issues that will arise in the very near future as the highway infrastructure ages. At the same time, advances in vehicle technologies and short-range communications will catapult us into the future where smart cities are just over the horizon. Fully automated vehicles are a much larger part of the vehicle mix, and vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, and the infrastructure can talk with one another. The potential of multiple connected, federated simulators and models for highway transportation research is great.