A REAL-TIME TRAFFIC SIMULATION SYSTEM

This article studies the usefulness of parallel processing in real-tim e traffic-flow simulation based on continuum modeling of traffic dynam ics, Computational fluid dynamics (CFD's) methods for solving simple m acroscopic traffic-flow continuum models have been studied and efficie ntly implemented in traffic simulation codes (on serial computers) in the past, We designed a traffic-flow simulation code and mapped it ont o a parallel computer architecture, This traffic simulation system is capable of simulating freeway traffic flow in real time, Tests with re al traffic data collected from the freeway network in the metropolitan area of Minneapolis, MN, were used to validate the accuracy and compu tational rate of the parallel simulation system, The execution time fo r a 2-h traffic-flow simulation of about 200 619 vehicles in an 18-mi freeway, which takes 2.35 min of computer time (on a single-processor computer simulator), took only 5.25 s on the parallel traffic simulati on system, This parallel system has a lot of potential for real-time t raffic engineering applications.