A First Step Towards Dynamic Hybrid Traffic Modeling

Abstract

Hybrid traffic modeling and simulation provide an important way to represent and evaluate large-scale traffic networks at different levels of details. The first level, called "microscopic" allows the description of individual vehicles and their interactions as well as the study of driver's individual behavior. The second, based on the analogy with fluidic dynamic, is the "macroscopic" one and provides an efficient way to represent traffic flow behavior in large traffic infrastructures, using three aggregated variables: traffic density, mean speed and traffic volume. An intermediate level called "mesoscopic" considers a group of vehicles sharing common properties such as a same origin and destination. The work conducted in this paper presents a first step allowing simulation of wide area traffic network on the basis of dynamic hybrid modeling, where the representation associated to a network section can change at runtime. The proposed approach is implemented in a simulation platform, called JAM-FREE.

Coupling Multi-agent and Macroscopic Simulators of Traffic

“…It allows to zoom on any part of the macroscopic simulation and to see it with a multi-agent model. [2] instead decomposes the network into microscopic and macroscopic clusters that exchange data, these clustering can change during the simulation to follow a phenomenon like a shockwave. These two examples concern the combination of two models inside the same simulator but there are other works about coupling two different simulators.…”

Multi-level agent-based simulations: Four design patterns

“…Conversely, the dynamic hybrid simulation of traffic flow [24] allows dynamically disaggregating a macro area into a set of micro agents (vehicles). The coupling used for the disaggregation is here once again destructive.…”

“…Moreover, in the same field of application, it can also be necessary to integrate multiple patterns to handle different aggregation and disaggregation cases according to the objective of the simulation ( Table 1 ). In the case of a dynamic hybrid simulation, the Zoom pattern is also used for disaggregation (in addition to the Cohabitation pattern) when the representation associated to an area is modified at runtime [24] . In the case of an interactive hybrid simulation, the View pattern is used for disaggregation [35] .…”