Modeling Process of a Third Dimension Universe for Transportation Simulation: Application to Railway System

In past years, 3D models of virtual worlds have been used in several applications such as urban planning, simulation and design. In the railway field, that we chose as a field of application to illustrate our proposals in this article, simulation makes sense because of the complexity involved and the risk for personnel during upstream phases of validation. To be able to simulation with enough precision, the model of the virtual universe is a key point. Especially For train component simulation, an accurate and detailed model of the train component is mandatory. For training the drivers within a serious game, a high visual quality is required. Obtaining a single model supporting these two constraints at the same time at the lowest cost is still an open issue and involved many actors. Our contribution is a methodology and a process for creating a virtual universe model, based on automatic model generation, in order to allow the creation of large-scale universes while guaranteeing a level of details appropriate to the need, a model of constant quality and including semantic data necessary for simulation, while reducing the modeling costs and the modeling duration. The proposed process is applied to train simulation.