Special Issue on Driving Simulation

Abstract

The past few decades have witnessed the use of several high-performance driving simulators in automotive companies and universities all over the world. Also, affordable simulators are being used for a growing number of applications, including vehicle engineering, road traffic, and training. The recent advent of autonomous vehicles makes the use of driving simulation even more crucial as driver-in-the-loop simulation is necessary to validate their application in mainly traditional, everyday traffic. The engineering design of driving delegation, such as overdriving or driving handover in critical situations, will only be possible for potentially hazardous situations through driving simulator experiments. The same need for simulation is observed for modeling and testing driving negotiation between autonomous and traditional vehicles in various traffic situations. The rendering capabilities and applicability of driving simulators are thus a crucial issue for simulator makers and users. Computer scientists and physiologists of visual and kinesthetic perception and action were first brought together some 20 years ago through international Driving Simulation Conferences (DSCs). The Proceedings of the DSC, held since 1995 in France, Germany, the United States, and Japan, are a valuable source of information in this field. In these proceedings you will find the latest results in the development of high-quality real-time rendering. These developments include computer graphics development, motion platform design for the efficient rendering of both sustained and transitory accelerations, validation studies for correct physiological rendering of perception and action, and industrial, human factors, and training applications. Nevertheless, the need for publications in a regular journal was often underlined, and although there was a Special Issue on Driving Simulation in the Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering in 2011 (Vol. 11), the need remained unfulfilled. Now, both through the selection of the best driving simulation conference papers and a special call for papers, this new Special Issue on Driving Simulation in SIMULATION, Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International will give you an overview of driving simulation techniques, thanks to technical and scientific papers reviewed by guest editors and well-known driving simulation experts. The covered fields include motion cueing, computer graphics, scenario control, and applications of Automotive Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS). I would like to thank the guest editors and the reviewers for their efforts to set up this special issue on driving simulation. I hope you, the reader, gain information and pleasure from these essential papers in the field of driving simulation technology and science.