Automated Generation of Virtual Scenarios in Driving Simulator From Highway Design Data

Zhao, Xi; Nelson, Alicia; Chrysler, Susan; Zhang, Yunlong · 2010 · ROSA P / Southwest Region University Transportation Center (U.S.)

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Summary

This report addresses the challenge of creating custom, drivable roadway segments for the Texas Transportation Institute’s (TTI) desktop driving simulator. TTI utilizes commercially produced simulators, which are limited to vendor-provided libraries of roadway segments. To overcome this limitation and support research into driver distraction, traffic control devices, and geometric designs, the project aimed to automate the generation of virtual scenarios from actual highway design data. The motivation was to enable researchers to construct specific environments without requiring extensive in-house programming expertise, thereby expanding the simulator’s utility for human factors research. The study evaluated two methodologies for generating these custom segments, referred to as "tiles." The initial approach attempted to use AutoCAD® Civil 3D®, a standard civil engineering design tool, to export roadway geometry into a format readable by the simulator’s authoring software, SimVista™. This method failed because key geometric features, specifically superelevation and curvature, were lost during the export/import process due to API incompatibilities and translation errors. Consequently, the researchers abandoned the automated conversion of Civil 3D files and adopted an alternative methodology using Presagis Creator Road Tools. This commercially available 3D modeling software allowed for the direct input of road design variables to generate drivable 3D models. The process involved defining road construction, tessellation, and path data in Road Tools, followed by a multi-step conversion of the resulting OpenFlight files into the simulator’s required Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) format. This included manual adjustments for textures, lane definitions, and traffic logic to ensure compatibility with existing simulator libraries. The results demonstrated that the alternative methodology using Road Tools successfully produced drivable roadway segments that could be integrated into the TTI simulator. While these custom tiles lacked the absolute geometric precision of those created in Civil 3D®, researchers determined they were sufficient for the institute’s primary focus on driving behavior studies. The generated tiles allowed for seamless connections with existing library segments and supported the customization of visual features and dynamic elements like traffic signals. The report notes that while the fidelity is lower than engineering-grade models, it meets the requirements for prompting normal driving behavior in controlled experiments. The significance of this work lies in establishing a practical, cost-effective workflow for generating custom simulation environments without requiring advanced programming skills. It enables TTI to expand its library of driving scenarios, facilitating more diverse and specific human factors research. The authors conclude that while the Road Tools method is adequate for behavioral studies, future work should continue exploring automated conversion from Civil 3D data to achieve higher geometric fidelity for applications requiring precise visualization of roadway designs.

Key finding

Automated export of roadway geometry from AutoCAD Civil 3D to the driving simulator failed due to lost design features, whereas using Presagis Creator Road Tools successfully generated drivable virtual scenarios sufficient for driving behavior research.

Methodology

modeling

Provenance

The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via bulk_ingest_rosap on 2026-05-23 (6 acquisition events logged).

Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• road geometry
• simulator validity fidelity

Information type

What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).

• Methodological Resource: tool software, validation psychometrics
• Theoretical Contribution: computational model