V-Platoon: Timing-Accurate Simulation for Virtual Truck Platooning

Virtual simulation is becoming an essential part of the development of autonomous driving vehicles. Even with the recent advancements for virtual simulation frameworks, less efforts have been made to enable timing-accurate multi-vehicle simulations. In this regard, we present a virtual simulation environment for truck platooning scenarios, where the simulation engine has to calculate the dynamics and environment change of multiple trucks. In such multi-vehicle simulations, the computation for simulation easily exceeds the given simulation hardware's computing capacity, making real-time simulations difficult to achieve. As a solution, we provide a synchronous multi-agent simulation framework that can synchronize the simulation engine's progress with the algorithm computations of each truck. Our synchronous simulation framework guarantees deterministic simulation results, however, at the cost of increased simulation running time. To alleviate the synchronization overhead, we also propose a shared memory-based massive data interface. Our method is implemented and evaluated based on the CARLA autonomous driving simulator.