A real-time simulator of the perceptive system of a mobile vehicle

Simulating a dynamic complex system consists in splitting the system into a number of elementary pieces and describing the behavior of each element and the interactions between these elements during a finite interval of time. Simulation is useful when the real system is not always available or when the system must be tested in dangerous or extreme situations. This is the case for developing a driving assistance system of a vehicle, where the system must detect real or potential dangers and inform the human driver consequently. This paper presents a real-time simulator used to develop the data management and the decision making modules of the driving assistance system. After a brief presentation of the driving assistance system, we show how traffic situations and the perceptive system are modeled and simulated using a real-time kernel.