Enhancing Traffic Simulations Analysis Efficacy using Multiperspective Heterogeneous Toolset

Abstract

Metropolitan areas and traffic congestion have grown hand-in-hand with the expansion of human populations around the world. The same factors that encourage people to gather in urban areas also contributed to the intolerable levels of traffic congestion on city streets. To reduce traffic congestion and enhance localized regional traffic flows, new research initiatives should be explored which leads to successful solutions. These solutions need to be repeatedly tested, which demands for a sizable increase in support staff engagement and substantiable infrastructure amendments to evaluate novel solutions. Typically, it is not practical to conduct frequent trials on day-to-day live traffic in urban areas. Hence, simulators are essential in traffic study, aiding in the evaluation of suggested solutions. However, relying solely on simulation results of a single simulator could result in erroneous conclusions, because of the structural limitations they pose in accurately simulating every complex detail of a traffic environment. In this paper, we make use of a heterogeneous toolset that includes three dissimilar simulators that assess traffic flows in different perspectives from microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic viewpoints and propose how a heterogenous toolset can be used to get more insights by using two sample study regions from Sri Lanka and India.