Microscopic Traffic Simulation: a Tool for the Analysis and Assessment of Its Systems

The need to simulate a number of advanced ITS concepts prior to deployment has also necessitated development of high performance microscopic simulators for estimating dynamic traffic assignment, freeway corridor diversion, as well as evaluating driver information systems (including variable message signs), vehicle guidance systems, real time adaptive traffic control strategies and other traffic management concepts. The high performance microscopic simulators capable of achieving such objectives should meet a set of basic requirements regarding the accuracy and performance of the traffic modeling, the ability to deal with the dynamic effects of time dependent traffic demands and, consequently, the time dependent route choices from each origin to each destination. This necessitates employment of behavioral models emulating the route choice processes. Finally, a practical simulator must have easy to use graphical interface allowing employment of all complex modeling components such as graphical editors for the geometry, interactive specification of control strategies, animated output and so on. In this paper a microsimulator specifically designed for assessing ITS systems deployment is presented. The simulator, called AIMSUN2, has undergone significant improvements since its inception in 1987 and it has been used in a number of real life projects. This has resulted in many modeling and functional improvements presented here, as well as acceptance for simulating large scale urban and freeway networks in Europe, Canada and Australasia. The methodology for model implementation is also described.