According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, up to 80% of automobile accidents can be prevented with improved vehicle connectivity, using Vehicle-to-Anything (V2X) communications. In this sense, Cooperative-Intelligent Transportation Systems can be very useful when situations such as construction site warnings and traffic congestion in highways caused by an accident or road damage are encountered. With vehicles connected together and connected with roadside infrastructure, all of these problems can be mitigated.
In SafeCOP, we build a simulation-based demonstrator for V2X communication applications such as stationary vehicle warning and adaptive traffic light systems employing state of the art tools, including OMNeT++, SUMO, and Veins.
OMNeT++ is an extensible, modular C++ simulation framework that is especially suitable for simulating networks, including Vehicular Area Networks (VANET). SUMO is a free and open simulator of traffic, particularly in urban areas. The two simulators can be connected using Veins, which allows to bridge the VANET and traffic simulations, keeping them coherent.
To implement the methods needed to support the SafeCOP Use Case on Vehicle to Infrastructure communication, we are extending Veins’ support of the SUMO tools to allow the simulation of road-side units including cameras for detecting the number of vehicles passing through an intersection in a given time unit.
Politecnico di Milano’s Master student Filippo Leveni developed the first step of this work, implementing the transmission of Lane Detector information from SUMO to OMNeT++ via Veins. The developments have been contributed back to the FOSS Veins project.