plafosim 0.15.4

A simple and scalable simulator for platoon formation.

Platoon Formation Simulator (PlaFoSim)

PlaFoSim - A simple and scalable simulator for platoon formation.

PlaFoSim aims to facilitate and accelerate the research of platoon maneuvers and formation for individually driven vehicles. While the main focus of the simulator is on the assignment process, simulation of advertisements and maneuvers is implemented in a more abstract way.

Conceptual view on the process of Platoon Formation:

Scenario	Advertisement	Assignment	Maneuver
A new vehicle enters the highway.	The vehicle advertises itself as interested in Platooning.	A Vehicle-to-Platoon assignment is calculated.	The new vehicle performs a join maneuver.

PlaFoSim is published here:

Julian Heinovski, Dominik S. Buse and Falko Dressler, "Scalable Simulation of Platoon Formation Maneuvers with PlaFoSim," Proceedings of 13th IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC 2021), Poster Session, Virtual Conference, November 2021.

Please note that PlaFoSim is still under heavy development.

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Installation

• Install Python (>=3.7.0,<3.10)
• Optionally, install SUMO (>=1.6.0)
• Install PlaFoSim via pypi: pip install plafosim

NOTE: The project is currently only tested under Linux.

Running a Simulation

You can use the simulator as module as well as from the command-line. Currently, only command-line is thoroughly tested and thus completely available though.

Quickstart

Use PlaFoSim's binary to run a simulation with the default configuration:

plafosim -d

Advanced Simulation Control

You can use a variety of different parameters to customize the scenario and the simulation itself. E.g., use the parameter vehicles to configure the number of vehicles in the simulation:

plafosim --vehicles 1000

The available parameters are grouped into different categories:

- road network properties
- vehicle properties
- trip properties
- communication properties
- platoon properties
- formation properties
- infrastructure properties
- simulation properties
- gui properties
- result recording properties

You can see the complete list of available parameters in the help:

plafosim -h, --help

Examples

# Configure a 100km freeway with ramps at every 10km
plafosim --road-length 100 --ramp-interval 10

# Configure random (normally distributed) desired driving speed of 130km/h
plafosim --random-desired-speed true --desired-speed 36

# Configure random trips for 500 vehicles
plafosim --vehicles 500 --random-depart-position true --random-arrival-position true --depart-desired true

# Pre fill the freeway with 1000 vehicles
plafosim --vehicles 1000 --pre-fill true

# Configure 50% of the vehicles with Advanced Cruise Control (ACC) and a headway time of 1.5s
plafosim --penetration 0.5 --acc-headway-time 1.5

# Enable a simple, distributed platoon formation algorithm [1] in order to form platoons every 30s
plafosim --formation-algorithm SpeedPosition --formation-strategy distributed --execution-interval 30

Live GUI

You can get a very simple live GUI based on SUMO by using the parameter gui (requires installation of SUMO and decleration of SUMO_HOME variable):

plafosim --gui

A screenshot of PlaFoSim's live GUI showing 2 platoons and various individual vehicles. Copyright © 2021 IEEE.

More options for the live GUI can be found within the gui properties section of the help.

Faster Simulation

You can speed up the simulation performance by enabling Python's optimization PYTHONOPTIMIZE, e.g., in order to disable assertions:

PYTHONOPTIMIZE=1 plafosim

See the Python documention for more details.

Re-Playing a Simulation

The simulation can write a trace file for every simulated vehicle (default results_vehicle_traces.csv). You can replay the simulation based on the trace file by using a corresponding binary:

plafosim-replay results_vehicle_traces.csv

To see all options of this script, run:

plafosim-replay -h, --help

Extending

• Clone the repository
• Install poetry pip install poetry
• Install PlaFoSim from source in editable mode poetry install
• Run PlaFoSim in the virtual environment with poetry run plafosim or activate the virtual enviroment first with poetry shell and run the commands as usual (see above)

NOTE: The project is currently only tested under Linux.

In order to add a new formation algorithm, you need to follow these steps:

• Create a new sub-class of FormationAlgorithm (see formation_algorithm.py). You can use the Dummy algorithm (see algorithms/dummy.py) as an example.
• Import your algorithm and add its __name__ to the list of available algorithms (see --formation-algorithm) within cli/plafosim.py.
• Add specific properties of your algorithm via an argument parser group to cli/plafosim.py if necessary.
• Import your algorithm and add parsing of its __name__ to __init__ within PlatooningVehicle (see platooning_vehicle.py) and/or Infrastructure (see infrastructure.py).

You should now be able to use your new algorithm with

plafosim --formation-algorithm dummy_algorithm_name

Contributing

In order to contribute, please follow these steps:

• Install PlaFoSim from source (see above)
• Make desired changes
• Run the tests located in scripts (see .drone.yml)
• Submit a Pull Request (PR)

Testing

When adding methods and functions, make sure to add corresponding unit tests for py.test. The tests are located under tests and can be executed with ./scripts/run-pytest.sh. This will also generate a test coverage report.

Validation

To validate the behavior of PlaFoSim, it is compared to SUMO 1.6.0 by means of simulation results (e.g., vehicle traces). The corresponding scripts are located under scripts and executed withn CI/CD pipelines. You can have a look at .drone.yml for details regarding the execution.

Contributors & Citing

PlaFoSim was designed built by Julian Heinovski with the help of Dominik S. Buse. It is currently maintained by Julian Heinovski. The list of all authors can be found here.

If you are working with PlaFoSim, please cite the following paper:

Julian Heinovski, Dominik S. Buse and Falko Dressler, "Scalable Simulation of Platoon Formation Maneuvers with PlaFoSim," Proceedings of 13th IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC 2021), Poster Session, Virtual Conference, November 2021.

@inproceedings{heinovski2021scalable,
    author = {Heinovski, Julian and Buse, Dominik S. and Dressler, Falko},
    title = {{Scalable Simulation of Platoon Formation Maneuvers with PlaFoSim}},
    publisher = {IEEE},
    issn = {2157-9865},
    isbn = {978-1-66544-450-7},
    address = {Virtual Conference},
    booktitle = {13th IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC 2021), Poster Session},
    month = {11},
    year = {2021},
}

License

PlaFoSim is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License 3.0 or later.

# Copyright (c) 2020-2022 Julian Heinovski <[e-mail]>
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

List of References

[1] Julian Heinovski and Falko Dressler, "Platoon Formation: Optimized Car to Platoon Assignment Strategies and Protocols," Proceedings of 10th IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC 2018), Taipei, Taiwan, December 2018.