TraffSim - A Traffic Simulator for Investigating Benefits Ensuing from Intelligent Traffic Management

With our interest to reduce traffic congestion, simulations are necessary to investigate how to achieve this goal. Because of the difficulty of real-time experiments, traffic simulators are a good and widely used tool for analyzing specific situations of the traffic flow virtually. This paper introduces TraffSim, a new platform-independent framework, which is capable of simulating microscopic vehicular road traffic in a time-continuous manner. It is able to simulate scenarios close to reality by using OpenStreetMap networks, creating precise and at the same time reproducible results. TraffSim is able to use various network types from multilane motorways to dense city road networks including multiple types of junctions or one-way streets and provides great extensibility and flexibility for both developers and users. Moreover, it allows free definition of vehicle properties like dimensions or engine features, which are used by several applicable models for longitudinal movement, lane-changing and fuel-consumption. We present the architectural and logical aspects of the simulator, as well as the user interface and statistics features.