Modeling and Simulation of a Car Race
Rolf Hoffman and Maurice Margenstern
This paper was motivated by an old car racing game played in French schools. First, the car racing scheme is defined by clear, simple rules. Second, an automatic driving strategy is presented where a car moves from the starting line to the arrival line from one temporary goal to the next. The car first searches for the remotest convex point at a border and fixes the next goal nearby it. Then it moves to it stepwise, first accelerating and then decelerating. It is shown that this strategy allows the cars to move automatically and safely around the circuit. Third, the whole system is modeled by a CA compatible model (GCA-w). This model allows an intuitive description and reduces the computational effort. Further promising research is outlined.
Keywords: Cellular automata with agents, GCA-w, car racing model, autonomous car, driving strategy, vector racing.