Olstam, Johan. (2008). Simulation of Rural Road Traffic for Driving Simulators.

Driving simulators are used to conduct experiments on driver behavior, road design,
and vehicle characteristics, etc. The results of the experiments often depend on
traffic conditions. One example is the evaluation of cellular phones and how they
affect driving behavior. It is clear that the ability to use phones when driving
depends on traffic intensity and composition, and that realistic experiments in
driving simulators must therefore include surrounding traffic. This paper describes
a model that generates and simulates surrounding rural road traffic for a driving
simulator. The model generates a traffic stream, corresponding to a given target
flow and simulates realistic interactions between vehicles. The model is built on
established techniques for time-driven micro-simulation of traffic. The model only
considers the closest neighborhood of the driving simulator vehicle. This
neighborhood is divided into one inner region and two outer regions. Vehicles in
the inner region are simulated according to advanced behavioral models while
vehicles in the outer regions are updated according to a less time-consuming model.
The paper also discusses calibration and validation of the model and the problem of
combining stochastic traffic and driving simulator scenarios.