Towards simulating non-lane based heterogeneous road traffic of less developed countries

Abstract

Microscopic traffic simulators have become efficient tools to conduct different analytic studies on roads, vehicles, behavior of drivers, and critical intersections, which lead towards a well-planned traffic solution. Devising a realistic and sustainable traffic solution requires replication of the real traffic scenario in a simulator. For example, to simulate the traffic streams of developing and under developed countries, we need to simulate non-lane based heterogeneous traffic stream, i.e., motorized and non-motorized vehicles, road traffic behaviors such as irregular pedestrian, illegal parking, violation of laws pertaining lanes, etc. However, most of the existing traffic simulators are unable to mimic the unstructured road traffic streams of less developed countries with their diversified behaviors. Therefore, in this work, we propose a new microscopic traffic simulator to handle non-lane based heterogeneous traffic stream and on road traffic behaviors that generally occurred in the road networks of cities in less developed countries. Our simulator receives network topology, traffic routes, and traffic demand flow rates as input, visualizes the traffic flows, and provides traffic statistics. To evaluate sustainability of our proposed simulator in real-life scenarios, we calibrate the simulator using real traffic data. Our evaluation reveals 99% accuracy in terms of travel time.