Modeling an ITS Management Solution for Mixed Highway Traffic With Eclipse MOSAIC

Mixed traffic of conventional and automated vehicles entails many challenges concerning the safe coexistence and the improvement of traffic efficiency. As a solution, a Traffic Management Center (TMC) combines information from physical sensors and communicated data to enable advanced traffic controllers. Since there is no sufficient penetration rate of automated vehicles nowadays, such a solution could be developed and tested with synthetically generated data using simulation, which models the future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). This paper addresses the challenges for evaluation of such a system by the means of simulation. For this purpose, we present the Eclipse MOSAIC Multi-Domain Simulation Framework, which provides the possibility to couple best-in-class simulators of the domains traffic, application, and communication, as well as to include further models and external native code libraries. Moreover, we discuss modeling extensions for traffic control algorithms and our method to create a highway scenario based on real traffic data. As primary result, many research questions for mixed traffic and ITS could be investigated using the MOSAIC framework. In an exemplary study, we analyze the deployment effort for infrastructure and communication technologies in order to facilitate a Mainstream Traffic Flow Controller in a realistic scenario with mixed traffic. Simulations performed with MOSAIC confirmed that traffic efficiency improvement is feasible even with fewer infrastructure components, thus with less cost.