A Comprehensive Simulation Environment for Testing the Applications of a V2X Infrastructure

It is a well-established fact that road transportation is one of the major contributors of greenhouse gases. The increase in the number of light and heavy vehicles in cities every day is providing additional impetus to this predicament. A solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions would be to “engineer” traffic to decrease congestion. One particular engineering-based solution can be to provide a green light optimized speed 98advisory (GLOSA). This method involves communicating the remaining phase time to vehicles approaching a junction, which can be used to compute an approach speed that will not require the vehicle to stop. However, the field implementation of this solution would require the installation of communication devices on both traffic signal heads and on vehicles, which would involve considerable cost and policy changes. Therefore, before implementation, it is desirable that any predicted benefits be gauged using alternative means so that the profitability of the installed infrastructure can be justified. We therefore present a novel simulation platform, which combines VISSIM, MATLAB, and NS3 in order to model the various components of a V2X-based application, such as GLOSA, with a high level of fidelity. In this chapter, we apply this simulation platform to compute the benefits of implementing GLOSA on two intersections, one located in Singapore and the other located in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The results illustrate the reduction in fuel consumption and queue length due to the execution of GLOSA for different traffic flows, communication parameters, levels of V2X penetration, and traffic signal policy.