Mesoscopic traffic simulation on CPU/GPU

Mesoscopic traffic simulation is an important branch of technology to support offline large-scale simulation-based traffic planning and online simulation-based traffic management. One of the major concerns using mesoscopic traffic simulations is the performance, which means the required time to simulate a traffic scenario. At the same time, the GPU has recently been a success, because of its massive performance compared to the CPU. Thus, a critical question is "whether the GPU can be a potential high-performance platform for mesoscopic traffic simulations"? To the best of our knowledge, there is no clear answer in the research area. In this paper, we firstly propose a comprehensive framework to run a traditional time-stepped mesoscopic traffic simulation on CPU/GPU. Then, we design a boundary processing method to guarantee the correctness of running mesoscopic supply traffic simulations on the GPU. Thirdly, the proposed mesoscopic traffic simulation framework is demonstrated to simulate 100,000 vehicles moving on a large-scale grid road network. In this case study, running a mesoscopic supply traffic simulation on a GPU (GeForce GT 650M) gives 11.2 times speedup, compared with running the same supply simulation on a CPU core (Intel E5-2620). In the end, this paper explains the theoretical limitation of running mesoscopic supply traffic simulations on the GPU. In conclusion, regardless of high system complexity, the proposed mesoscopic traffic simulation framework on CPU/GPU provides an innovative and promising solution for high-performance mesoscopic traffic simulations.