EVSIM09

One important advancement in the ITS area is the introduction of the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. This new technology opens new frontiers leading to multi-vehicle strategies and making the existent traffic simulators inadequate for modern purposes due to the lack of communication and information management. Until now the research focus of the ITS group in the ISR-UC was in individual Intelligent and Electric Vehicles (EV), but with the new technologies enabling communication and demanding information management, the research is turning from single to communicant multi-vehicles. The lack of communication and information models, energy consumption models and an appropriated architecture of the existing traffic simulators made the group decide to research these models and new simulator architectures. As the development of a new class of traffic simulators, suitable for massive traffic simulations with communicant vehicles should demand much time and a great effort (beyond the scope of this project, and more adequate to a larger International project) the group decided to extend functionalities of one of the available traffic simulators in order to study 3D energy consumption without depending on the implementation of the new class of simulators. The project has four main research components: 1) Energy models for EV; 2) Communication and information management models for V2V and V2I; 3) New traffic simulation architecture; 4) Extensions of an existing traffic simulator.