Integrating traffic & driving behaviour in automotive research

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) promise a number of benefits for the individual, the society and the economy, e.g. regarding road safety, social inclusion and transport efficiency. At the same time, it is of high relevance for the competitiveness of the European industry and it provides the potential for disruptive innovation in the transportation of people and goods and in the associated services. While so far the safety and efficiency of road transport was organized with the driver and other road users being in charge to comply with traffic rules and traffic management, connected and automated road transport implies an essential paradigm shift from such approach; automated vehicles will directly receive stimuli from traffic. On the other hand, interaction design must solve potential loss of safety in mode transition situations up to SAE level 3 of CAVs and interaction between automated and human driving behaviour should be carefully considered. Moreover, the human role changes even more fundamentally from a driver to a user/passenger (SAE level 4 and 5). All the previous said, traffic and driving behaviour have to be duly taken into account in the development and testing, as well in the validation of CAV solutions and in the definition of the Operational Design Domains (ODDs) associated to CAVs development and testing. Finally, in-vehicle systems need to collaborate with off-board perception systems through intelligent transportation systems (ITS), such as positioning, navigation and dynamic maps, as well as real-time traffic information, to enhance the in-vehicle perception system capabilities. In order to properly deal with all the previous needs, a comprehensive simulation platform is going to be established at the University of Naples Federico II, aimed to help scientists and technicians in the development and testing of CAVs. The platform is based on a co-simulation approach, able to integrate different state-of-the art tools (coming from different domains) into one enhanced platform. The issues to be addressed and the architectural framework at the base of the integrated platform are here briefly presented.