By

  1. Jason Sewall
  2. David Wilkie
  3. Ming C. Lin

SIGGRAPH Asia 2011

Overview of large city filled with traffic; using 100% agent-based simulation Overhead of large city filled with traffic; using mixed agent-based and continuum simulation (continuum outside yellow box) Overhead of large city filled with traffic; using mixed agent-based and continuum simulation (continuum outside yellow box) Overhead of large city filled with traffic; using mixed agent-based and continuum simulation (continuum outside yellow box)

Overview

City traffic generated using our method

We present a novel, real-time algorithm for modeling large-scale, realistic traffic using a hybrid model of both continuum and agent-based methods for traffic simulation. We simulate individual vehicles in regions of interest using state-of-the-art agent-based models of driver behavior, and use a faster continuum model of traffic flow in the remainder of the road network. Our key contributions are efficient techniques for the dynamic coupling of discrete vehicle simulation with the aggregated behavior of continuum techniques for traffic simulation. We demonstrate the flexibility and scalability of our interactive visual simulation technique on extensive road networks using both real-world traffic data and synthetic scenarios. These techniques demonstrate the applicability of hybrid techniques to the efficient simulation of large-scale flows with complex dynamics.

Paper

Preprint PDF (11-page article + 7 pages of appendices) (3.9MB)

Image of paper pages

BibTeX entry

@Article{sewall-hybrid11,
author  = 	 {Jason Sewall and David Wilkie and Ming C. Lin},
title   = 	 {Interactive Hybrid Simulation of Large-Scale Traffic},
journal = 	 {ACM Transaction on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia)},
year    = 	 2011,
volume  = 	 30,
number  = 	 6,
month   = 	 {December}}

Video

YouTube

MP4 (203MB, 720p encoded using h264)

Results

Performance results for hybrid method

One of key objectives for this work is to facilitate the cooperative use of disparate simulation strategies — agent-based and continuum traffic simulation — in a traffic network for extensive metropolitan areas. There are numerous reasons that this is desirable: continuum techniques have performance advantages over agent-based simulations in many situations — their computational cost is proportional to size of the network, not to the traffic therein. Furthermore, the limited and regular memory access patterns of continuum algorithms are much more amenable to scalable parallelism than those found in agent-based algorithms. This plot shows the performance of single-thread agent-based, continuum simulation, and our hybrid technique where for a city road network with a variety of vehicle densities. Purely continuum simulation outperforms purely agent-based by 10–20x and our hybrid scheme (in this case, a constant portion the road network is simulated with agent-based, and the rest with continuum) is 9–17x faster than pure agent-based. These results were collected on an Intel© Core(TM) i7 980X processor running at 3.33GHz.

Additional Images

Low angle view of traffic simulated with our method Overhead view of traffic simulated with our method