A Novel Co-Simulation Platform for Driving Performance Evaluation of Various Road Users

Researchers widely acknowledge virtual reality in driving simulation as a very useful tool in the field of road engineering and safety, capable of investigating how various factors, both external and internal to the driver, may affect the perception of driving risk. These topics of research have been widely developed over the years, both from a hardware point of view, ensuring a diverse and comprehensive range of driving simulators capable of covering the different types of means of transport (vehicle, motorcycle, bicycle, etc.), and also from a software point of view, ensuring increasingly effective modeling capable of realizing realistic and efficient scenarios. However, the advent and ever-increasing use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the realization of digital twins in the infrastructural domain opens the way for multiple developments in driving simulation. Indeed, in the last few years, the need for investigating simultaneously the interactions and interferences among different road users, especially vehicles’ drivers and vulnerable road users, has increased. The present study concerns the development of new and advanced tools that can effectively address this need, enabling the use of simulation systems that are highly faithful to reality and have an unprecedented degree of versatility. Such a development makes it possible to switch from virtual reality to metaverse logic, exploiting digital twins and related digital equipment, thus realizing simulation scenarios faithful in every part to as-built or planned projects. To this purpose, a real-time 3D platform has been opportunely developed by means of a process that allows to create scenarios with BIM-based modeling software to be made interactive, using metaverse viewing glasses as the user interface element, while also achieving the goal of streamlining the hardware configuration of the simulators and aimed at evaluating simultaneously the driving behavior and performance (such as speeds, distances, accelerations, …) of different road users (vehicles’ drivers, pedestrians, motorcyclists, cyclists) experiencing at the same time the same road scenarios.