Variable Message Signs (VMS) are dynamic items for traffic signalling and information which started to be widely introduced in the last years in the road infrastructures of the Spanish territory and other European countries. Their main purpose is to control traffic and adjust it to changes or incidents.
They are basically used to inform drivers about any event or incident interesting for road safety or traffic fluency like traffic density, nearby car accidents, closed roads or streets, adverse atmospheric conditions, etc. Furthermore, they are frequently used to remind drivers of important traffic rules in certain circumstances.
The current paper expounds the development of an architecture to define and model the 3-D texts and graphs that are visualized on the VMS. The generated models have been included in a driving simulator that was developed by the Institute of Traffic and Road Safety of the University of Valencia after several years of collaboration among professionals from different areas.
The use of simulation gives outstanding advantages compared with on-road experimentation ones. Those advantages may be summed up in the possibility to analyse the VMS features and their influence on driving in a quicker and more economic way.