About the Standards of a Driving Simulation for Road Engineering: A New Approach

Standards' validation of a driving simulation is needed to consistently approach the questions of road engineering and the impacts on safety. This simulation approach is used in order to take into consideration human factors in road accident generation. Road safety is not only related to physical and cinematic events but also to psychological factors, though the technical rules normally neglect them. Many psychologically based studies have shown how some internal and external stresses can produce unsafe actions of the driver. Sometimes the road itself directly induces these stresses. Recent on road experiments, using an instrumented vehicle, confirmed this theoretical framework, such as some occasional studies based on the simulation. On road surveys are usually very difficult and expensive to perform. Moreover it is possible to analyze only the existing road geometries and environments. Finally the collected data are not always stochastically significant. To overcome these difficulties a driving simulation based analysis of the safety of road is here proposed. The driving behaviour in simulation has already been validated. The aim of this paper is to identify the configurations of the virtual reality (VR) system relating to each different objective of the study. The dynamic equations and the electronic and physics characteristics of the interfaces are here considered. The parameters of the dynamic model are classified in road ones, such as geometry and pavement, vehicle ones, such as engine, shape/mass, and tire and environment ones, such as meteorological data. The interfaces are related to the visual, acoustic and mechanical feedbacks. This study numerically checks different configurations of the system through more than 10³ simulations, in order to identify the minimum standards in function of the different road engineering and safety needs. Previous research results in psychological and medical fields are here assumed and briefly verified, in order to assess the image generation rate, the auditory virtual environment, and each sensorial feedback. The considered configurations for the system have been performed and validated using the simulator of CRISS (STI driving simulator). The paper shows very promising frontiers and the implications and opportunities are discussed.