Full-scale Traffic Simulation of Wuppertal

(pictures on this pages can be seen in large by clicking upon them)

The simulation yet to be done consists of five parts, which closely resemble the classical four-stage algorithm of the traffic-engineering:

Traffic generation

Here we try to calculate the time-dependent O/D-matrix for Wuppertal, i.e. the demand for transportation as a function of time. This movie (12.2 MB AVI) shows the time-dependence of the total in- and outgoing demand for transportation. In the next step, (after splitting the public transport part, which is handled separately,) this O/D-matrix is converted into the routes of the individual cars by means of

Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA)

The DTA-algorithm takes the O/D-matrix and computes a set of routes from it by using a so-called simulation-based approach (day-to-day simulation). This means, that a pretty fast microsimulation model is used (able to calculate 10⁸ cars in real-time), which resolves the road-network on a link-basis. The routes are then input into an

Microscopic Simulation of Traffic

which is used to resolve the traffic-load on a high spatial and temporal resolution, but can compute only 10⁶ cars in real-time. A small example of such an simulation, which may give a first impression, can be be gained with the following

movie, encoded in MPEG (12.4 MB), which unfortunately is rather large. Please note, that the cars are driving randomly in this network, since the dynamic O/D-matrices and the sampling of traffic counts is not yet finished.

Finally, the traffic-load computed in this way can be used to calculate the emissions, that are finally put into models for the

Simulation of Transmission & Transport of Pollutants

Models of this kind are able to model the transformation of emissions to immissions, that are finally used to understand the

Impact on Humans & Environment

However, there are other effects of traffic on humans and environment than immissions alone, e.g. a very strong effect stems from the separation effect that roads with high traffic load impose on the inhabitants near the road.

Last modified: Tue Jun 29 17:04:41 MET DST 2004 (PW)