Improving a Roundabout Design Through Simulation in a Unity 3D Virtual Environment

Abstract

Traffic congestion is one of the most serious problems in big cities. This paper proposed a simplified design of roundabout to simulate and improve the traffic condition of a real-life roundabout in Somerville, MA. A virtual environment was built by using Unity 3D to simulate the Powder House Square roundabout. This study used the driving simulator in Northeastern University’s Intelligent Human-Machine System (IHMS) Laboratory to conduct the experiment, using a NASA Task Load Index (TLX) to measure the workload experienced by the participants. The experiment results show that the total time spent on simplified sector was 47.2 % less than the original design, and the number of accidents were reduced by 60.9 %. The average frustration level dropped by 79.2 % on the simplified sector according to the NASA TLX survey. Simulation results showed strong evidence that traffic conditions improved a lot by using the simplified design.