Event-Driven Queue-Based Traffic Flow Microsimulation

Abstract

Simulating traffic flow is an important problem in transport planning. The most popular simulation approaches for large-scale scenarios today are aggregated models. Unfortunately, these models lack temporal and spatial resolution. But microsimulations are interesting for traffic flow simulation, as they can accurately simulate features requiring both high temporal and high spatial resolution, including traffic jams and peak periods. However, most microscopic approaches involve high computational costs and expensive large computers to run them within a reasonable time. This work presents possibilities for reducing these costs by using a queue-based model and an event-driven approach jointly. The approach makes it possible to run large-scale scenarios with more than 1 million simulated person-days on networks with 10,000 links in less than 10 min on single CPU desktop computers present in most offices today.