From GIS to Mixed Traffic Simulation in Urban Scenarios Jörg Dallmeyer, Andreas D. Lattner Information Systems and Simulation, Goethe University Frankfurt, POB 111932 60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany {dallmeyer, lattner}@cs.uni-frankfurt.de Ingo J. Timm Business Informatics I, University of Trier 54296 Trier ingo.timm@uni-trier.de ABSTRACT Simulations are widely used for modeling, analysis, plan- ning, and optimisation of traffic flows and phenomena. For realistic traffic simulations within urban scenarios, the fol- lowing tasks have to be solved: (1) modeling of the road structure; (2) specification of the behaviour on the road. In our days, very detailed road models for almost any major city exist in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the last two decades, the Nagel-Schreckenberg model (NaSch) has been established as de facto standard for car behaviour in freeway traffic due to its efficient and realistic simula- tions. Within urban scenarios, NaSch lacks of flexibility to integrate heterogeneous road users like cars and bicycles. The tasks mentioned before are addressed in this paper, i.e., we propose an approach for modeling and specification of urban mixed traffic simulations. As a first step (1), an ex- tended graph as basis for traffic simulation has to be de- signed. For a concrete scenario, it will be automatically generated on basis of OpenStreetmap cartographical mate- rial. The specification of road user behaviour (2) has been influenced by the NaSch model. However, the model has been extended to cover the lack of NaSch in urban scenar- ios: A non cell-based approach is chosen for traffic move- ment. Furthermore, the routing of traffic users is based on either probability or A* based routing. In this paper, de- tails on the modeling and specification are presented and experimental results are provided. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.6.5 [Simulation and Modeling]: Model Development General Terms Traffic Simulation, Urban Scenarios, GIS 1. INTRODUCTION With a continuous growing amount of road users, the num- ber of traffic jams, transportation costs and gasoline con- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIMUTools 2011 March 21–25, Barcelona, Spain. Copyright 2011 ICST, ISBN 78-963-9799-87-5. sumption increases. The field of geological inspired traffic simulations has therefore become important in science and industry. A wide range of publications is available, dealing with traffic simulations for the prediction of certain events, like traffic jams. It is important to have a powerful sim- ulation tool, in order to be able to forecast such events on time and to take measures in order to have an impact on the events. Another fundamental application for traffic simula- tions is the optimisation of traffic lights for a city network, an area with much optimisation potential. The field of traffic research is an old-established field of re- search, which has started with makroscopic models, describ- ing the flow of traffic with help of fluid dynamics models. Mi- croscopic models, describing a simplified behaviour of road users to allow for emergent effects, e.g. traffic jams, have been established later. The defacto standard for this field, the Nagel-Schreckenberg model, is efficient to compute as it is based on a cellular automaton model. The model is able to reproduce observed effects on freeway traffic. The work presented here modifies the model to be adequate for inner city and freeway traffic. In addition, the modifi- cation allows to simulate traffic with different kinds of road users. The presented simulation tool is intended to simulate the traffic road networks of real world cities and their surround- ing areas. Since the OpenStreetmap 1 initiative gives the op- portunity to work with cartographical material, updated on a daily base, we decided to integrate this material in our simulation system. The simulation is therefore built on a Geographic Information System (GIS), which is based on the free toolkit GeoTools 2 . An underlying GIS gives the freedom to import environment models from heterogeneous data sources and to combine them in one simulation. This work is structured as follows. In section 2, a brief survey of related work is given. The following section 3 de- scribes the way from imported GIS layers to a graph datas- tructure for simulation. Section 4 discusses the used model for traffic behaviour, followed by a briefing on the used sim- ulation control in section 5. The evaluation results are pre- sented in section 6. The article closes with a conclusion and an outline of the future work in section 7. 2. RELATED WORK This work is governed by work of the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and GIS based simulations. The 1 http://www.openstreetmap.org 2 http://www.geotools.org/ 3HUPLVVLRQ WR PDNH GLJLWDO RU KDUG FRSLHV RI DOO RU SDUW RI WKLV ZRUN IRU SHUVRQDO RU FODVVURRP XVH LV JUDQWHG ZLWKRXW IHH SURYLGHG WKDW FRSLHV DUH QRW PDGH RU GLVWULEXWHG IRU SURILW RU FRPPHUFLDO DGYDQWDJH DQG WKDW FRSLHV EHDU WKLV QRWLFH DQG WKH IXOO FLWDWLRQ RQ WKH ILUVW SDJH 7R FRS\ RWKHUZLVH WR UHSXEOLVK WR SRVW RQ VHUYHUV RU WR UHGLVWULEXWH WR OLVWV UHTXLUHV SULRU VSHFLILF SHUPLVVLRQ DQGRU D IHH 6,08722/6 0DUFK %DUFHORQD 6SDLQ &RS\ULJKW k ,&67 '2, LFVWVLPXWRROV