In recent years, technologies concerning wireless connections between vehicles as well as between vehicles and infrastructure have been developed and tested extensively all over the world. They are aiming at the improvement of traffic efficiency, road safety and driver's comfort by means of a significant amount of real time information on the vehicle's environment. After years of basic research and theoretical analyses on potential impacts of a connected vehicle environment, more and more real world tests are conducted in the US as well as in other parts of the world, especially Europe and Japan. Since 2009, there is an Implementation Agreement between the US and EU to develop coordinated research programs with a focus on cooperative vehicle systems. The agreement has since led to successful and important standardization results. There are various initiatives in the US and EU connected vehicle research programs which try to prove the capability of these standards and their implementation. This seminar focuses on recent efforts and early results of the sample project simTD, one of the largest field operational tests worldwide, which has been prepared and conducted in Germany since 2008. The field operational test has been accompanied by a simulation laboratory which enables further possibilities concerning the assessment of potential future scenarios as well as safety critical situations. Traffic simulation allows for extrapolating from a limited number of single drivers' and vehicles' behavior to large-scale overall traffic flow and even for stochastic based analysis of road safety indicators. Extensive simulation studies usually result in a large amount of data which can be challenging to handle. However, processing them for significant results with respect to traffic efficiency and road safety impact can be very valuable. In the project simTD, an integrated evaluation environment consisting of real-world test, driving simulator and traffic simulation was installed. This way, it is possible to refine and validate driving behavior models based on real drivers and vehicles. Researchers use these models as a basis for impact studies that would be impossible to set up when using just one single testing environment.      «

In recent years, technologies concerning wireless connections between vehicles as well as between vehicles and infrastructure have been developed and tested extensively all over the world. They are aiming at the improvement of traffic efficiency, road safety and driver's comfort by means of a significant amount of real time information on the vehicle's environment. After years of basic research and theoretical analyses on potential impacts of a connected vehicle environment, more and more real...     »