A Vehicle-in-the-Loop Emulation Platform for Demonstrating Intelligent Transportation Systems

In an emerging world of large-scale, interconnected, intelligent transportation systems, demonstrating and validating novel ideas and technologies can be a challenging one. Traditionally, one is presented with a choice to make, between performing demonstrations with a few proof-of-concept “outfitted” vehicles, or experimenting with large-scale computer simulation models. In this chapter, we revisit a recent vehicle-in-the-loop (VIL) emulation platform that was developed with the goal in mind of taking steps towards countering the above validation dilemma. Roughly speaking, it was shown that a real, outfitted test vehicle, equipped with novel intelligent transportation technologies, could be “embedded” in a large-scale traffic emulation being performed with the microscopic traffic simulation package SUMO, thus allowing the real vehicle and driver to interact with thousands of simulated cars on a common road map in real-time. In our present work, we now provide an overview of the latest updates to the VIL platform, which include some enhancements to increase the platform’s versatility and improve its functionality.