Wireless technology supporting vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, allow vehicles and infrastructures to exchange information, and cooperate. Cooperation among the actors in an intelligent transport system (ITS) can introduce several benefits, for instance, increase safety, comfort, efficiency.

Automation has also evolved in vehicle control and active safety functions. Combining cooperation and automation would enable more advanced functions such as automated highway merge and negotiating right-of-way in a cooperative intersection. However, the combination have influences on the structure of the overall transport systems as well as on its behaviour. In order to provide a common understanding of such systems, this paper presents an analysis of cooperative ITS (C-ITS) with regard to dimensions of cooperation. It also presents possible influence on driving behaviour and challenges in deployment and automation of C-ITS.

Vehicles in cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) often need to interact with each other in order to achieve their goals, safe and efficient transport services. Since human drivers are still expected to be involved in C-ITS, driving simulators are appropriate tools for evaluation of the C-ITS functions. However, driving simulators often simplify the interactions or influences from the ego vehicle on the traffic. Moreover, they normally do not support vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) communication, which is the main enabler for C-ITS. Therefore, to increase the C-ITS evaluation capability, a solution on how to extend a driving simulator with traffic and network simulators to handle cooperative systems is presented as a result of this paper. Evaluation of the result using two use cases is presented. And, the observed limitations and challenges of the solution are reported and discussed.

For a few decades, driving simulators have been supporting research and development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). In the near future, connected vehicles are expected to be deployed. Driving simulators will need to support evaluation of cooperative driving applications within cooperative intelligent transportation systems (C-ITS) scenarios. C-ITS utilize vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) communication. Simulation of the inter vehicle communication is often not supported in driving simulators. On the other hand, previous efforts have been made to connect network simulators and traffic simulators, to perform C-ITS simulations. Nevertheless, interactions between actors in the system is an essential aspect of C-ITS. Driving simulators can provide the opportunity to study interactions and reactions of human drivers to the system. This paper present simulation of a C-ITS scenario using a combination of driving, network, and traffic simulators. The architecture of the solution and important challenges of the integration are presented. A scenario from Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) 2016 is implemented in the simulator as an example use case. Lastly, potential usages and future developments are discussed.