Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation of Connected and Automated Vehicles Using Game Engine: A Cooperative On-Ramp Merging Study

Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) has been a popular approach to modeling autonomous and interacting agents in a multi-agent system. Specifically, ABMS can be applied to connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), since CAVs can be driven autonomously with the help of on-board sensors, and cooperate with each other through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. In this work, the authors apply ABMS to CAVs using the game engine Unity3D, taking advantage of its visualization capability and other capabilities. In this research, the authors have built agent-based models of CAVs in the Unity3D environment, where vehicles are enabled with connectivity and autonomy by scripts written in C#-based API. The authors also build a simulation network in Unity3D based on the city of Mountain View, California. A case study of cooperative on-ramp merging has been carried out with the proposed distributed consensus-based protocol, and then compared with the human-in-the-loop simulation where the on-ramp vehicle is driven by a human driver on a driving simulator. The authors evaluate the system benefits of introducing the proposed protocol in terms of travel time, energy consumption, and pollutant emissions. It is shown from the results that the proposed cooperative on-ramp merging protocol can reduce average travel time by 7.08%, reduce energy consumption and pollutant emissions by 8.48% and 140.2%, respectively, and guarantee the driving safety when compared to the human-in-the-loop scenario.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB15 Standing Committee on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    ,    
  • Authors:
    • Wang, Ziran
    • Kim, BaekGyu
    • Kobayashi, Hiromitsu
    • Wu, Guoyuan
    • Barth, Matthew J
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2019

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 6p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01698371
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 19-05843
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Mar 1 2019 3:51PM