Large scale multi-agent traffic simulations

Kai Nagel

Institute for Land and Sea Transport Systems, TU Berlin, Salzufer 17-19 Sek SG 12, 10587 Berlin, Germany

It is now possible to micro-simulate the traffic of whole metropolitan areas with 10 million travelers or more, "micro" meaning that each traveler is resolved individually as a particle. In contrast to physics or chemistry, these particles have internal intelligence; for example, they know where they are going. This means that a transportation simulation project will have, besides the traffic microsimulation, modules which model this intelligent behavior. The most important modules are for route generation and for demand generation. Demand is generated by each individual in the simulation making a plan of activities such as sleeping, eating, working, shopping, etc. If activities are planned at different locations, they obviously generate demand for transportation. This however is not enough since those plans are influenced by congestion which initially is not known. This is solved via a relaxation method, which means iterating back and forth between the activities/routes generation and the traffic simulation. This talk will present the general computational architecture of such a project, and the implementation status of such a project for the traffic of all of Switzerland.