SIMON
The SIMON project is funded by the mFUND initiative of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and runs from 2024 to 2027 with a total budget of €2.0 million. In cooperation with academic and industry partners, the project addresses the challenge of enabling safe, expectation-compliant, and intuitive mobility in mixed and smart traffic environments.
Motivation
As connected, automated vehicles become more common on public roads, it is essential to ensure that all road users, including vulnerable groups such as pedestrians and cyclists, can participate safely and confidently in traffic. Existing systems lack the ability to anticipate and communicate dynamic traffic risks, especially where direct interaction, like eye contact, is absent. SIMON addresses this gap by leveraging vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, swarm intelligence, and a digital twin of the traffic environment to provide real-time, context-aware guidance that improves safety, flow, and sustainability.
Project Goals
The project develops a dynamic traffic context model based on a digital twin enriched with real-time and semantic data streams to identify risk scenarios and generate coordinated, intuitive action recommendations. These are communicated with road users through a dedicated Human-Machine Interface „Trafficpilot“ and made accessible via navigation platforms such as OpenStreetMap and the Mobilithek. The system uses V2X communication to evaluate the resilience and scalability. Digital twins further serve to standardize V2X messages in the context of behavorally complimant risk-management.
Methods
Our research integrates cloud-based systems with real-time processing of V2X data to ensure resilient and scalable deployment of solutions for connected, intelligent traffic infrastructure. Through virtual simulations and real-world lab evaluations, the proposed system is assessed with respect to its accuracy, responsiveness, and user acceptance in diverse traffic scenarios. Digital twins for X-in-the-Loop testing (XIL) further serve to investigate new communication standards for V2X solutions.
