OLSIM: Inter-urban traffic information

Nowadays detailed and reliable information about current and future traffic states is a crucial requirement not only for each modern traffic control centre, but also for driver accessible traffic information applications. In this work the novel traffic information system OLSIM is presented that is based on three components. The first is a highly realistic traffic flow model with which all vehicles in a large scale network are simulated. The second component consists of efficient data processing and forecast algorithms that form heuristics from a large database that is fed every minute by traffic data of 4,000 inductive loop detectors across the road network. The third is a graphical user interface which can be accessed at www.autobahn.nrw.de. More than 200,000 users each day indicate the importance of such a system.