The present report presents a part of workpackage 3 of the ELSTAR (European Low-cost Simulation Technology for the Armed forces) project. This project is carried out under contract of the Ministries of Defence of five countries participating in the EUCLID Research Technology Project 11.8, viz. Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, and The Netherlands. One of the basic premises of the ELSTAR approach for developing low-cost training systems is to identify and select those critical task elements that can be simulated at low cost with high fidelity and training value. Therefore, in workpackage 3 (Simulator Requirements) of the ELSTAR project, an elaborate investigation of the task- and training requirements and -investments of the selected training areas, must render more detailed specifications of the corresponding training systems. The present report concerns one of these training systems, i.e., driving simulators. It is based on the previously performed task analysis in which the driving task is analysed into 17 so-calIed Elementary Driving Tasks (EDT's and on the minimal functional requirements, which were provided per EDT (van Winsum & Korteling, 1998; Kappé and Korteling, 1998). By relating these specifications to technological requirements they can be translated into simulation costs per EDT. Also the required (conventional) training investments per EDT are estimated, which provides an indication of the savings that can be accomplished by simulator training. In this rather simple way cost-saving comparisons between different simulator configurations could be made such that one configuration could be composed with an optimal ratio between costs and savings. On the basis of this a simulator configuration is presented with an optimal relationship between costs and savings. This simulator enables the effective training of all procedures and elementary vehicle control skills, traffic insight and interaction with other traffic. Complex vehicle control skills, such as terrain driving, will have to be trained on a real vehicle. Finally, a number of problems are mentioned for which solutions must be found or knowledge must be acquired. (Author/publisher)
Abstract