By Peter Murphy
Published June 8, 2023
A team of transportation engineering researchers from the University at Buffalo shared their research using different game engine simulations to enhance transportation at the Modeling and Simulation (MODSIM) World 2023 Conference.
Faculty, staff and students in the UB Stephen Still Institute of Transportation and Logistics (ISTL) presented a paper authored by ISTL program director Kevin Hulme titled, “Game Engine Modeling & Simulation (M&S) Implementations to Evaluate Human Performance in Transportation Engineering.” According to Hulme, who led the presentation, the paper provided insight into two different game engine approaches with different transportation applications.
“We offer a demonstration of two game engine implementations in-development that enable ongoing human performance assessments within diverse transportation applications,” Hulme says.
Game engines are software frameworks generally are used to develop video games. These frameworks contain different settings and configurations to advance and streamline video game development. Hulme and others implemented the two most popular game engines, Unity and Unreal, to generate different modeling and simulation experiences to analyze the different ways humans interact with vehicles and other transportation subjects.
The Unity game engine is featured across mobile, console, virtual reality and desktop games, including some popular franchises like “Pokemon Go” and “Call of Duty: Mobile.” Hulme’s Unity game engine implementation examines human distraction in transportation.
“The first implementation implements the Unity game engine for the creation of a ground transportation network to support the analysis of distraction potential, during manual operation, amidst navigational information sources that can be internal or external to both the vehicle and the driver,” Hulme says.
The Unreal engine has been used in several console, desktop, mobile and virtual reality platforms, including the “Final Fantasy,” “Gears of War” and “Fortnite” franchises. Hulme’s team is implementing this engine for predictive purposes.
“The second implementation implements the Unreal game engine for the creation of a test and evaluation network to forecast future modes of human transport during autonomous operation, particularly hybrid ground-flight vehicles and Advanced Air Mobility,” Hulme says.
According to Hulme, transportation remains a critical multidisciplinary challenge, and efficient intermodal transportation is growing more important to society. As transportation systems have continued to evolve, the development of digital graphics, computational visualizations and gamification approaches have revolutionized authentic virtual environments to observe human behavior within the next-generation mobility scenarios.
“To appropriately advise future test and evaluation and validation of next-generation mobility mechanisms, advanced digital platforms for human performance analysis remain an essential requirement,” Hulme says. “Advanced modeling and simulation – including the live-virtual-constructive-autonomous (LVCA) taxonomy – continues to transform all aspects of our current and future research, training and educational communities.”
The paper’s co-authors include Roman Dmowski, robotics engineer at Bosch; Prajit Kumar, a UB mechanical engineering student; Rajyavardhan Karra, a UB data science alum; Rachel Lim, a former engineering associate with the ISTL’s Motion Simulation Laboratory (MSL); and Meredith Finn, a UB mechanical engineering alum and former student assistant in the MSL.
The conference was held in Norfolk, Virginia from May 22-23.
