Real-time environment for micro-simulation of urban traffic

The paper presents results of the feasibility study of real-time microscopic simulation of urban traffic (using the HUTSIM micro-simulator) which has been extended to accept the real-time telemetry data provided by the urban traffic control system (SCOOT). The motivation for this study was the desire to overcome the limitation of the off-line traffic simulators for which the microscopic results do not correspond to reality. The heterogeneous computing resources that are utilised for the execution of the simulator and the urban traffic control system meant that there was a need for a suitable distributed computing environment to integrate the software components. A purpose-made Distributed Memory Environment (DIME) software, developed at the Nottingham Trent University, and the on-line version of the HUTSIM software, developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, have been deployed in this study. After presenting the principles of interfacing the micro-simulator to the real-time traffic measurements the paper discusses the prototype implementation of the system. An important benefit of such an integrated environment is the novel extension of the use of micro-simulation as a tool for implicit measurements of the averaged acceleration rates, which offers a valuable insight into the dynamics of traffic processes.