Design And Prototyping Of A Tram Simulator For The Local Public Transport Service Provider

Nowadays, urban transport networks especially metro and tram networks are in a rapid growth period. Countries worldwide are undertaking projects to develop urban transportations due to several factors. Firstly, an efficient system that transports passengers to their work places is urgently needed. Secondly, the impact caused by massive transport systems that use fossil fuel has become a great environmental issue, more and more people particularly who live in big cities are aware of the severity of air pollution. Moreover, as the problem of economic crisis, the number of people who prefer public transport systems increases significantly because in general the travel costs are cheaper than the private car ones. As the rapid growth of urban transportations, how to train driver of metro and tram in an efficient and low-cost way has become an issue for urban transportation companies.A driver simulator for training is a good solution to this issue. Driving simulation has been used for many years now in research, industry and training to simulate virtual driving conditions. In this paper, we proposed a prototype design of a realistic tram simulator which will be used as a new driver training platform of the local public transport service provider T2C(Transport en Commun de l’agglomération Clermontoise). The framework of our tram simulator consists of GUI(Graphical User Interface), Mobility Module and Tram Cab. GUI is responsible for displaying the front view of the tram, namely what a driver will see when the tram is moving. The Mobility Module acts as a brain in the simulator. The main role of this module is to simulate the mobility of tram and its surrounding environment according to the realistic tram line. The Tram Cab is in charge of receiving the commands from the driver and sending the commands to Mobility Module. Network Sockets are used for the communications between modules, and it can make our simulator a distributed system which means that each module can be put in any computer within one network. We use XML to encapsulate the data transmitted between modules because of XML’s simplicity and extensibility, and it will be easy to add more data without changing other parts of the program.The current results demonstrated the feasibility of this protot ype design of tram simulator and gained positive responses from T2C Company.