VUEMS: a virtual urban environment modeling system

The Praxitele project is responsible for the design of a new kind of transportation in an urban environment, which consists of a fleet of electric public cars. The realization of such a project requires experimentations with the behaviour of autonomous vehicles in the urban environment. It was necessary to design a virtual urban environment in which simulations could be done. Reproducing the real traffic of a city as completely as possible, implies the simulation of autonomous entities like living beings. Such entities are able to perceive their environment, to communicate with other creatures and to execute some actions either on themselves or on their environment. Interactions between an object and its environment are, most of the time, very simple: sensors and actuators are reduced to minimal capabilities which permit them only to avoid obstacles in a 2D or 3D world. This is due to the fact that databases for virtual environments are often confined to the geometric level, when they must also contain physical, topological and semantic information. Accordingly, we propose a model which is designed to connect different levels of representation, by assembling geometric, topological and semantic data in the field of traffic simulation, and its implementation in VUEMS, a Modelling System of Urban Road Network. From real world data (when available), we construct a model of the virtual urban environment, integrating all the information needed to describe the realistic behaviour of car drivers and pedestrians.