SMARTS: Scalable microscopic adaptive road traffic simulator

Abstract

Microscopic traffic simulators are important tools for studying transportation systems as they describe the evolution of traffic to the highest level of detail. A major challenge to microscopic simulators is the slow simulation speed due to the complexity of traffic models. We have developed the Scalable Microscopic Adaptive Road Traffic Simulator (SMARTS), a distributed microscopic traffic simulator that can utilize multiple independent processes in parallel. SMARTS can perform fast large-scale simulations. For example, when simulating 1 million vehicles in an area the size of Melbourne, the system runs 1.14 times faster than real time with 30 computing nodes and 0.2s simulation timestep. S..