SIMUSAFE – Driving Simulator for Enhanced Traffic Safety

Simusafe has overcome the limitations of driving simulators and traffic simulation as valid tools for traffic safety studies, and has studied the relationship between simulator testing and naturalistic driving tests.

Project Description:

File: 723386

ITCL leads the consortium of the European project Simusafe (Simulator of behavioural aspects for safer transport). The project aims to overcome the limitations of driving simulators and traffic simulation as valid tools for traffic safety studies, and to bridge the gap between them and naturalistic driving tests.

This will be achieved by creating tools to understand and analyze traffic scenarios at micro and macro scales with the ability to incorporate the behavior of actors from real environments into simulated ones.

The project is funded by the European Commission through its H2020 program. This program funds research and innovation projects in various thematic areas in the European context.

SIMUSAFE is a collaborative research project, and is led by the Simulation and Virtual Reality area of the Technological Institute of Castilla y León (ITCL) with a duration of 3 years and a half, and a budget of 8,739,480.00 euros.

The SIMUSAFE project will develop a system capable of monitoring and evaluating human cognitive and physical capabilities, and will replicate these characteristics in a simulated environment, becoming a powerful tool to improve the effectiveness of interventions in the area of road safety. In addition, this model will be extended to simulate and analyze scenarios with multiple drivers (real or virtual) to identify the underlying reasons that may indirectly cause traffic incidents.

Simulators with real environments

SIMUSAFE will work on the basis of simulators developed by ITCL, which currently include realistic environments and situations, real traffic and pedestrians, giving greater realism to driving.

The simulators allow to practice in a safe environment, absolutely risk-free, and with the possibility of repeating the exercises as many times as desired, allowing the user to experience certain extreme situations of real life that otherwise would not be possible. The simulators are the ideal tool to prepare students in driving schools before they are faced with driving a real vehicle.

After conducting a series of driving tests with real users in natural environments over a period of several months, SIMUSAFE will extract the necessary characteristics to generate an equivalence between driving in the real environment and the simulated one in different vehicles (bicycle, motorcycle, car) and pedestrians.

Subsequently, the necessary algorithms will be developed to create risk behaviors in the simulated environments based on real behaviors and finally the simulators will be tested with aggravating circumstances such as the use of drugs, alcohol, or certain medications.

Project Duration:

2017-2020

Europeran Project in Collaboration with:

The project consortium is made up of 16 entities from 9 European countries (Spain, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Sweden, Slovakia, Netherlands, Portugal, Germany):