Simulating Traffic Networks

Abstract

For driving the roads of cities into enjoyable and relaxing places with parks, trees, and seating, a paradigm change in everyone’s commuter behavior is needed. Still, individual transport via cars increases, and thus, the space required for parking and driving these cars shapes our cities — not the people.  Next to the space needed, vehicles pollute the environment with CO2, diesel particulate, and even electric cars with tire abrasion. Alternative modes of locomotion, like public transportation and shared mobility, are still not attractive to many people. Intelligent intermodal mobility networks can help address these challenges, allowing for efficient use between various transportation modalities. These mobility networks require good databases and simulation combined into digital twins. This paper presents how such a digital twin can be created in the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) software using data from available and future city sensors. The digital twin aims to simulate, analyze, and evaluate the different behaviors and interactions between traffic participants when changing commuting incentives. Using the city of Osnabrück and its different available sensor types, the data availability is compared with other towns to discuss how the data density can be improved. Creating a static network from open street data and intersection side maps provided by the city of Osnabrück shows how these data can be integrated into SUMO for generating traffic flows and routes in SUMO based on a database of historical and live data. Within the conclusion, the paper discusses how developing a digital twin in SUMO from static and dynamic data can be improved in the future and what common misconceptions need to be overcome.