In most recent cases, motivated by the need to conduct tests in both physical and virtual test environment, a digital twin of the physical world is often created in the virtual environment to be used for testing purposes. This approach is often used in when testing automated driving systems (ADS) which are being extensively tested by companies and cities around the world. While this approach may work well with ADS, whose behaviour can be deterministic in both physical and virtual worlds, human drivers are known to exhibit different behaviour in simulation compared to real situations.

Since human drivers are still expected to be involved in future transport systems, the difference in driving behaviour needs to be understood in order to assist in verification and validation of the transport system. Therefore, in this work, we intend to investigate the differences in driving behaviour of human drivers, comparing the same manoeuvre done on the proving ground to the manoeuvre recorded in a driving simulator. 

Data collected from a proving ground will be compared with data collected from a driving simulator (under the same manoeuvre) to analyse differences in driving behaviour between the two test environments. More specifically, there are two datasets in this work: 1) data collected from AstaZero proving ground; and 2) data collected from the "Sim IV" driving simulator at VTI.

The difference between collected data will be analysed using statistical methods. The results indicating difference in driving behaviour between the two datasets will be presented. The results will be analysed and presented in the context of verification and validation of transport systems using digital twins.

This work intends to present the differences in driving behaviour of human drivers, comparing the same manoeuvre done on the proving ground to the manoeuvre recorded in a driving simulator. The result will provide some indication on the validity of using driving simulator as a virtual test environment for verification and validation of transport systems.