IRVIN - intelligent road and vehicle test infrastructure

Simulation, or rather virtual testing, is a good instrument for study and design of traffic management concepts, traffic safety, vehicle safety and ergonomics. Simulation facilitates the evaluation of the design at an early stage and reduces the costs of making prototypes. The Dutch research organization TNO, recently started a new initiative named 'SUMMITS' (sustainable mobility methodologies using intelligent transport systems), to aid the field of intelligent transport systems (ITS). The initiative in particular addresses intelligent co-operative road-vehicle systems (ICRVS): intelligent vehicles co-operating with intelligent roads. SUMMITS has developed IRVIN as it main tool environment for testing and assessing ITS solutions for the current congestion, safety, and environmental problems of road traffic in an early phase of the design process. The objective of IRVIN is to be a modular toolset that allows the user to combine any of his tools as required for the research question at hand. The objective of providing an integrated infrastructure of (hardware and software) is well underway. This paper discusses the architecture and implementation of IRVIN, the initial experiments and results.