Cognitive Aspects of Traffic Simulations in Virtual Environments

Abstract

Using virtual environment systems for road safety education requires a realistic simulation of road traffic. Current traffic simulations are either too restricted in their complexity of agent behavior or focus on aspects not important in virtual environments. More importantly, none of them are concerned with modeling misbehavior of traffic participants which is part of every-day traffic and should therefore not be neglected in this context. We present a concept for a traffic simulation that addresses the need for more realistic agent behavior with regard to road safety education. The two major components of this concept are a simulation of persistent agents which minimizes computational overhead and a model of cognitive processes of human drivers combined with psychological personality profiles to allow for individual behavior and misbehavior.

How Routing Strategies Impact Urban Emissions

“…The higher 𝑤, the more randomly perturbed the fastest path is. Therefore, DR with 𝑤 > 1 allows us to model the driving behaviour of vehicles that do not strictly follow navigation apps' suggestions and, simultaneously, 1 https://openrouteservice.org/dev/#/api-docs 2 https://developer.tomtom.com/routing-api 3 https://sumo.dlr.de/docs/duarouter.html to model the imperfection and non-rationality of human drivers [53]. Indeed, individuals get distracted when driving (e.g., take wrong turns), and they lack complete knowledge of the city's traffic, the road network, and the best path to reach a destination.…”

“…To model the driving behavior of vehicles that are not 𝑅-routed (i.e., they do not follow any navigation apps' suggestion) and the imperfection and non-rationality of human drivers [53], we perturb the fastest path between an origin and destination pair. DR allows perturbing the fastest path using a randomisation parameter 𝑤 ∈ [1, +∞), where 𝑤 = 1 means no randomisation (i.e., the fastest path), and the higher 𝑤, the more randomly perturbed the fastest path is.…”