Hardware-in-the-Loop and Traffic-in-the-Loop for Testing Cooperative Intersection Management

A simulation is a useful tool for evaluating the impacts of various changes in a transportation system, especially in the case of real-time traffic-adaptive control systems, which must undergo extensive laboratory testing before being implemented in a field environment. Various simulation environments are available, from software-only to hardware-in-the-loop simulations, each of which plays a specific role in implementing a traffic control system. This study applied a CA-MPC (Model Predictive Control based on a Cellular Automata model) for a real-time traffic-adaptive control framework as it progressed from a laboratory project to actual field implementation. The traditional software-only simulation environment and extensions to a hardware-in-the-loop simulation are presented, describing the migration of CA-MPC onto the traffic controller hardware itself. In addition, a new enhancement to the standard software-only simulation is described, which allows remote access such that the simulation and traffic control scheme are not required to reside locally.