Development of a Road Traffic Simulator by an Autonomous Vehicle Movement Model

Abstract

Increasing vehicular traffic are causing traffic jam and social economic loss in recent years. Dynamic traffic management systems based on actual traffic conditions are expected to reduce these problems. Computer simulation is a powerful tool to evaluate the system performance of new traffic management system, since it is difficult to evaluate it under various traffic conditions in the real world due to huge costs and safety concerns. In this paper, we propose a new microscopic traffic simulation model by object-oriented programming style. In this model, the street network is composed of nodes and links and vehicles run autonomously in the street network. The autonomous vehicle movement model is composed of decision model that depends on the driver's character and vehicle motion model that depends on the attribution of the vehicle. Then, we analyze the quality of our proposed model and show the effectiveness for evaluating the performance of the traffic management systems. © 1996, The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. All rights reserved.