Almost 100 Styrian companies and institutions applied for the Innovation Award Styria this year. VIRTUAL VEHICLE has now been awarded for “Symul8”, a simulation platform for adapting traffic regulations for automated driving.

The challenge: Traffic planners and legislators face the challenge of incorporating automated driving into their infrastructural and strategic traffic management. Despite existing software solutions, modeling, calibration, and simulation of road traffic has so far required in-depth expertise. The incorrect use of simulation software sometimes also leads to misjudgements of planned traffic measures.

The solution: With the Symul8 platform, simulation tools for road traffic are now made available to a broader expert community for the first time. The overall conception of the simulation platform enables a comprehensible, easy to understand and versatile creation of simulation scenarios by a free configurability of the simulation settings.

Univ.-Prof. Martin Fellendorf, Head of the Institute of Highway Engineering and Transport Planning (ISV) at TU Graz: “With the Symul8 simulation platform, future traffic rules for automated driving can be studied in detail. We are pleased to open new and innovative paths for future traffic planning with this transnational project for Austria, Germany and Switzerland.”

Dr. Jost Bernasch, Managing Director of VIRTUAL VEHICLE: “Cooperative, connected, automated mobility is an important building block on the way to a climate-neutral mobility system. The project “Symul8″ provides a valuable contribution to this and we are very pleased to receive the Styrian Innovation Award! This award confirms our strategy of supporting the successful path toward climate-neutral mobility with networked research and the latest technology.”

Austria-Germany-Switzerland consortium: The research project was coordinated by the Institute of Highway Engineering and Transport Planning at Graz University of Technology, and involved not only VIRTUAL VEHICLE but also the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), the Chair of Transportation Engineering at Ruhr University Bochum, and the Swiss company Rapp Trans AG; the clients were the highway operators ASFINAG (Austria) and ASTRA (Switzerland) and the German Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt).

A detailed press release (German language) can be found here here.

Picture: Prof. Martin Fellendorf (Institute of Highway Engineering and Transport Planning, TU Graz; 4th from left), Dr. Jost Bernasch (Managing Director VIRTUAL VEHICLE; 4th from right) with Styrian Minister MMag Barbara Eibinger-Miedl (2nd from right) and DI Marlies Mischinger-Rodziewicz (Senior Researcher Control Systems, VIRTUAL VEHICLE; 3rd from right). Source: VIRTUAL VEHICLE