Simulation Environment for Visualizing Connected Ground and Air Traffic

Abstract

Cameras are the most popular sensors deployed on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and many studies since 2000 have shown their ability to track vehicles and monitor traffic. At the same time, dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and cellular vehicle to everything (C-V2X) communication technologies are gaining momentum in both standardization and implementation. In this work, we create a simulation environment that provides capabilities to simulate connected ground and air traffic in a single application. This environment is built alongside PTV Vissim and has the goal of being one of the default tools used by transportation professionals to simulate air vehicles and communication for ground traffic use cases. Vissim event-based scripts and a custom Python package called PyPTV form the foundation of this simulation environment. This work first discusses the simulation capabilities, software architecture, and techniques used to improve simulation speed. The results then show that this simulation environment can be used in many different cases. Videos are given to show example simulations.