Driving Simulators Validation: The Issue of Transferability of Results Acquired on Simulator

Simulators have become, and in an inescapable way, a mean to improve the knowledge in the field of driving behavior. The investigations which can be led with this type of tool concern in particular the driver’s behavior and the conception of vehicles and road infrastructures. In the field of driving training the simulator tool is also more and more used, notably for the training (initial and retraining) of professional truck drivers or special machine drivers (forklifts, cranes, excavators, and also combined harvester, wood feller buncher…). The advantages of the studies on simulators are numerous: lack of risk, reproducibility of the situations, strict control of the parameters, time saving, costs decrease. The goal of this paper is to review the validation problems and to propose the emergence of “good practices” of usage. The authors first remind the physicals rendering limits of simulators and then offer a classification of the uses and also discuss validation problems for each use. The paper concludes with the necessity of an ethics of use, made more and more necessary by the current and the future possibly wide distribution of the driving simulator tool.